Google announced that it has acquired the Dutch company Cornerstone, which specializes in helping enterprises migrate their legacy workloads from mainframes to public clouds. Cornerstone, which provides very hands-on migration assistance, will form the basis of Google Cloud’s mainframe-to-GCP solutions.

“This is one more example of how Google Cloud is helping enterprise customers modernize their infrastructure and applications as they transition to the cloud,” said John Jester, VP of Customer Experience at Google Cloud.  

Cornerstone brings a wealth of experience and innovative solutions and services that help customers modernize their infrastructure and applications. “Their capabilities will form the “cornerstone” of Google’s mainframe-to-GCP solutions, and customers are able to take advantage of these new capabilities now through the Professional Services Organization and our partner network,” Google said in a statement. 

For decades, companies have relied on a mainframe architecture to run their mission-critical workloads, but it often holds developers back from taking advantage of new technologies that enable them to innovate more quickly.  

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 modernization is at the heart of the Cornerstone toolset. Through the use of automated processes, Cornerstone’s tools can break down Cobol, PL/1, or Assembler programs into services and then make them cloud native, such as within a managed, containerized environment.

Cornerstone solutions bring a number of benefits to customers as they modernize 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.