Google has announced the acquisition of Cornerstone Technology for an undisclosed amount, with the company hoping to leverage Cornerstone’s tech to help customers migrate their mainframe workloads to Google Cloud. 

In a statement on the company’s blog, Google noted, “Cornerstone brings a wealth of experience and innovative solutions to our portfolio of products and services that help customers modernise their infrastructure and applications. Their capabilities will form the ‘cornerstone’ of our mainframe-to-GCP solutions, and customers are able to take advantage of these new capabilities now through our Professional Services Organisation and our partner network.”

While may will perceive mainframes as old hat, Google knows that there are still many organisations around the world who have mainframes active. Take the banking industry for example, 85% of all transactions still pass through a mainframe. The acquisition of Cornerstone gives Google the leverage to tempt those large firms over to Google Cloud, rather than having those companies opt for one of Google’s competitors, such as AWS or Microsoft Azure. 

One financial services customer who has already decided to make the switch from a mainframe to the cloud is Boa Vista, a large financial services company in Brazil. Google announced that after its acquisition of Cornerstone, Boa Vista will be utilising the technology to migrate to Google Cloud and modernising its applications using Cornerstone’s toolset. 

“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. This approach to application modernisation is at the heart of the Cornerstone toolset,” the company added in its statement. 

“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, containerised environment.”

According to Google, Cornerstone solutions bring a number of benefits to customers as they modernise their infrastructure and applications on Google Cloud:

Migration roadmap development: Conduct an assessment on your entire mainframe environment, find the macro and the microservices, and create a roadmap to a modern services architecture, making it easy to plan your path to the cloud.

Conversion flexibility (“any-to-any”): Convert any language to any other language and any database to any other database to prepare your applications for modern environments.

Automated data migration: Easily move your mainframe data, unlocking its value to drive new innovative use cases in data analytics and data warehousing.