Another promising technology startup, another acquisition by a West Coast giant.
In a busy week for Boston tech deals, this one stands out: Stackdriver, a two-year-old company working on cloud-application monitoring, is being acquired by Google. Terms of the deal weren’t given, but Google product manager Tom Kershaw says in a blog post that Stackdriver is joining the search giant’s cloud platform team.
“Stackdriver has built a leading service to help developers intelligently monitor the apps and services they’re building and running in the cloud. This allows customers to have more visibility into errors, performance, behavior, and operations,” Kershaw writes. “The teams are going to be working to integrate Stackdriver’s great functionality so that Google Cloud Platform customers can take advantage of these new advanced monitoring capabilities.”
That makes the deal sound less like a talent acquisition and more like a product integration—though we’ll see about that.
Google’s other recent acquisitions in the Boston area include ITA Software and Boston Dynamics. The Stackdriver buy might help Google compete better with Amazon on the cloud-computing front.
Stackdriver’s software gives cloud-based companies a way to monitor the performance of their applications within Amazon Web Services, cloud database systems, and Web server clusters. The 30-person startup is led by co-founders Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri, both former VMware employees. (Interesting that Google bought them, instead of VMware or EMC.)
Another key team member is Phil Jacob, who is no stranger to big-company acquisitions. Jacob’s previous startup, StyleFeeder, was bought by Time in 2010.
Stackdriver raised $15 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners. The investors confirmed the deal but declined to comment on the specifics, so it’s hard to know how good an outcome it is, or what the cash-stock breakdown is. The Stackdriver team hasn’t responded to requests for comment.
It’s worth pointing out that early Stackdriver investor Ben Nye—with Bain Capital Ventures, and now CEO of VMTurbo—has a strong track record in application performance management. He previously invested in dynaTrace (acquired by Compuware), AppNeta, and other related companies.
In late 2012, Belcher wrote an op-ed for Xconomy on the need for better cloud-management tools in the IT and Internet industries. How prescient he was.
