Google Cloud Providers Deliver Extended Integration Capabilities to GCP

MongoDB Atlas is now available as the first managed service in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) among the seven database and analytics platform providers that the company formed alliances with earlier this year. The release comes as Google Cloud accelerates its push to gain ground on larger rivals Amazon and Microsoft to build a portfolio of enterprise cloud services tied to a broad ecosystem of data platform providers.

The alliances with MongoDB, Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, Neo4j and Redis Labs, announced at the Google Cloud Next conference in April, promised to deliver managed database service offerings in GCP with consolidated billing, shared support and a common management console. Manvinder Singh, Google Cloud’s director of IaaS/PaaS partnerships, said general availability of the other managed database services should follow shortly, but MongoDB made an early push.

“We’re seeing amazing customer momentum for MongoDB Atlas on GCP,” Manvinder told Channel Futures during a meeting at last week’s MongoDB World in New York. Among those customers announced are Live Nation Universe, Auto Trader UK, and cybersecurity provider startup Panorays.

“Being the fact that we’re elevating Atlas to a first-class experience makes it really easy for them to use all those services,” Manvinder said.

Upon taking over as CEO of Google Cloud earlier this year, Thomas Kurian, a longtime top Oracle executive, determined extending the breadth of its database and analytics services was a key priority. While third-party databases can run in Amazon or Microsoft Azure, Kurian proposed an approach where Google offers a more favorable partner compensation model, according to Alan Chhabra, MongoDB’s SVP of worldwide partners.

Specifically, Chhabra noted that Amazon offers better terms for partners for its recently launched MongoDB competitor, DocumentDB, than it does for third-party services such as MongoDB. Similarly, Microsoft makes it more appealing to partners to lead with Cosmos DB than with third-party services. Though such practices are not unusual, Google is taking a unique approach, Chhabra explained.

“Thomas, at least with these seven partners, said, ‘We’re going to pay Google sellers the same, whether it’s a Google-organic offering or MongoDB Atlas,’” Chhabra told Channel Futures. “That is very unique and trailblazing in the industry.”

MongoDB Atlas is a scalable, on-demand version of the company’s namesake database. Available in the three major hyperscale clouds, MongoDB Atlas has become a popular alternative to the on-premises version of its NoSQL database. As part of its agreement to offer the managed service on GCP, the partnership called for integrating core GCP services – including identity and access management, TensorFlow-based AI, Kubernetes and logging and management – into Atlas.

Building on the alliance announced in April, MongoDB earlier this month said it was going further with support for bring-your-own-key encryption management, virtual private cloud (VPC) peering and the option for fully managed backups with the ability to take snapshots either on-demand or scheduled.

Wikibon’s James Kobielus

“It seems like Thomas Kurian is putting a fair amount of emphasis on partnerships like this one to help Google overcome its competitive disadvantage, meaning that it is in third place in the cloud arena behind Amazon and Microsoft,” said James Kobielus, lead analyst for data science, deep learning and application development at Wikibon.

MongoDB is one of many database platform providers expending more resources to Google Cloud.  Earlier this month, Informatica also extended its alliance with Google Cloud. While Informatica already provides support for its core data integration and analytics offerings in GCP, it’s now extending its entire portfolio and supporting a broader set of GCP services.

Informatica late last month said that it is providing integration with all GCP data stores, including Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage and Marketing Analytics. In addition to Google Cloud, Informatica will also integrate with Google’s Dataproc serverless offering for Hadoop and Apache Spark big data workloads. The two companies are in the process of enabling compatibility between …

… Informatica’s platform-as-a-service integration offerings, including its Integration Cloud, MDM Cloud and Governance Cloud and GCP.

Ronen Schwartz, Informatica’s SVP and general manager for data and cloud integration, described three benefits this will offer to partners looking to work with clients on digital and business transformation projects.

“In the bigger picture, Informatica is helping customers move, improve and work with their data and leveraging the unlimited scalability and strong capabilities of [Google] Big Query,” Schwartz told Channel Futures.  

The second area is in the area of marketing, but not limited to it, Schwartz added.

“These capabilities will be available natively in GCP, making the offering to the CMO much more attractive,” he said.

Third, it will provide a new platform for creating AI and machine learning models.

“This is where Google innovation is really amazing from the TensorFlow perspective, to build its analytics into the data warehouse, where Informatica is the best-of-breed offering to bring the data that is needed to build a model, optimize the model and then execute the models,” he said.

Another cloud data warehouse provider, Snowflake, earlier this month said it will add GCP to the mix of clouds on which it runs. Initially, Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse ran only on Amazon, and more recently the company ported it to Azure as well. Snowflake said it will provide early access to the GCP option later this year, with rollout scheduled for early 2020.