Google today announced it has acquired AppBridge, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company that specializes in helping businesses move their files and data into the Google Cloud platform.
Using AppBridge, businesses can move their on-premise data to Google Drive, but the service also offers connectors for moving to Google’s platform data, email and files from Box.net, Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365 and similar services.
The company was already a Google Partner and the fact that it specialized in moving data to G Suite surely made it an obvious take-over target. “AppBridge has been a good partner to us,” Google VP of Engineering Prabhakar Raghavan told me in an interview ahead of the announcement. He also noted that moving files to G Suite isn’t as easy as it may sound. “It’s not just sucking up the files because that’s easy,” he said. “It’s the semantics and metadata of the folder structures and stuff. So it’s a mapping exercise and in many of our largest deployments, they get important. So we decided to bring them in-house and productize their connectors.”
It’ll still be a while until we’ll see this functionality inside of a full G Suite product for the enterprise, though. Down the road, though, this means Google won’t have to try to convince a CIO to work with a partner to move data into its cloud because it’ll be able to offer this capability already.
According to Crunchbase, AppBridge, which launched in 2014, never raised any outside funding. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
