Google is launching a digital store that will offer cloud-based software to companies and other organizations. Bloomberg, which reported the news a bit earlier, notes the move is just the juggernaut’s latest effort to ensure that cloud leaders, and specifically Amazon Web Services, don’t leave the company in the dust.
Google isn’t launching the store alone but rather partnering with MobileIron, a once venture-backed company that went public in 2014 and is focused around mobile device management. Indeed, in a new blog post about the new store, Google says the collaboration is designed to bring together Google Cloud’s Orbitera commerce platform with MobileIron’s app distribution, security and analytics capabilities.
The white-label offering will come with a handful of features, says Google, including customized bundles to enable operators to create groups of services by customer segments; customized branding for both operators and customers of the marketplace; one bill for everything across all of a customer’s devices, data, voice and third-party cloud services; secure cloud access to ensure that only trusted users who are using trusted apps on trusted devices get access to the cloud services; and usage analytics.
Google had acquired the startup Orbitera in 2016 for what TC was told at the time was just north of $100 million. The company developed a platform for buying and selling cloud-based software and was gobbled up to help Google improve how it competes against Amazon’s AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft, all of which sell their enterprise services in the cloud.
Google’s new initiative has competition. For starters, as Bloomberg notes, AT&T offers a virtual private network to allow users to securely connect to cloud services. Still, the marketplace should make it easier and simpler for users to pay for a host of services at once, rather than having to source them from multiple places.
It also should provide Google stronger footing in this particular slice of the business world if all goes as planned.
Avots: Techcrunch
