Google Acquires Cloud Storage firm Elastifile to Ramp up Business against Amazon Web Series and Microsoft

Aiming to ramp up its Cloud business against marker leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, Google Cloud's CEO Thomas Kurian has announced the acquisition of Elastifile, a provider of scalable enterprise storage for the Cloud, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition of Elastifile is expected to be completed later this year. This is the second acquisition under Kurian who quit Oracle and joined Google Cloud as its head in November last year. Last month, Google announced plans to acquire data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion.

"Elastifile is a pioneer in solving the challenges associated with file storage for enterprise-grade applications running at scale in the cloud," Kurian said in a statement on Tuesday.

They've built a unique software-defined approach to managed Network Attached Storage (NAS), enabling organizations to scale performance or capacity without cumbersome overhead.

File storage is fundamental to enterprise infrastructure and a priority for customers looking to accelerate their digital transformation.

Elastifile was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in the Israeli coastal city of Herzliya and in Santa Clara, California.

So far, the company has raised a total of $75 million from funds and investors, including Chinese giants Huawei and Lenovo, as well as Samsung, Cisco and Dell.

According to Kurian, the combination of Elastifile and Google Cloud will support bringing traditional workloads into Google Cloud Platform (GCP) faster and simplify the management and scaling of data and compute intensive workloads.

"We believe this combination will empower businesses to build industry-specific, high performance applications that need petabyte-scale file storage more quickly and easily. This is critical for industries like media and entertainment," said Kurian.

The amount of the acquisition was not reported by the two companies, but it was estimated in the Israeli media at around $200 million.

"We're excited to join Google for the next part of our journey. File storage is essential to enterprise cloud adoption and, together with Google, we are well-positioned to serve those needs," said Erwan Menard, CEO at Elastifile.