Google acquires Cornerstone Technology for mainframe migration

Google Cloud on Wednesday announced it has acquired Cornerstone Technology to help customers migrate their mainframe workloads. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

The Dutch Company, founded in 1989, helps companies migrate mainframe data through a highly-automated process, and it helps them convert languages and databases to prepare applications for modern environments. 

"As the industry increasingly builds applications as a set of services, many customers want to break their mainframe monolith programs into either Java monoliths or Java microservices," Google's Howard Weale wrote in a blog post. "This approach to application modernization is at the heart of the Cornerstone toolset. Through the use of automated processes, Cornerstone's tools can break down your Cobol, PL/1, or Assembler programs into services and then make them cloud native, such as within a managed, containerized environment."

While mainframes are seen as old fashioned by many in the tech industry, large enterprises still rely on them to process transactions. For instance, 85 percent of all credit card transactions run through the IBM z mainframe, IBM's Philip MacLochlainn told ZDNet earlier this year. 

The acquisition is one of a series of purchases Google has made in recent years to help customers migrate to the cloud. Last year, Google acquired the data migration startup Alooma, as well as CloudSimple, makers of software that lets customers migrate and run VMware workloads natively in public clouds. In 2018, Google acquired Velostrata to help enterprise clients migrate large-scale VM systems and workloads.

Meanwhile, the company is taking a number of other steps to cater to enterprise customers. It launched Premium Support services earlier this year and has forged new partnerships with cybersecurity firms. Google recently disclosed that its Cloud business has hit a $10 billion annual revenue run rate.