It was only a matter of time before cloud ecosystem participants started to come together. Last month saw Google and Salesforce.com partners Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne merge (see Cloud partners get the M&A bug), now Google premier enterprise partner Grove Group has announced the acquisition of Cloud Direct.
The move brings two cloud services providers together, creating greater critical mass. Terms were not disclosed. Grove Group, with offices in London plus South Africa and the US, is a SaaS systems integrator working primarily with Google services but also Amazon and Salesforce.com, as well as providing its own cloud-based applications. Cloud Direct matches the geographic spread with offices in London as well as South Africa and the US, offering cloud brokerage services and consultancy through its JamCloud delivery and lifecycle management platform and network.
This looks like a nice pairing that will enable Grove Group to extend the scope of its offerings and put it in a better position to approach large global enterprises. Cloud Direct should benefit from greater mass and market reach, although given Grove Group’s Google partner status it will no longer be vendor agnostic.
The deal brings two predominantly service providers together rather than application specialists, highlighting the growing need for services to bring the diverse and expanding range of SaaS applications together. As far as we can see cloud-to-on premise integration forms the major part of the market but demand for inter-cloud integration is rising so cloud services brokers will be in demand but the likes of Grove Group/Cloud Direct will be competing with global service providers such as Infosys who has declared its intentions around cloud integration.