Google announced in a blog post today that it has acquired CloudSimple, a company once central to Microsoft’s cloud ambitions.

CloudSimple is a “secure, high performance, dedicated environment in Public Clouds to run VMware workloads.” Google struck a partnership with CloudSimple in August, following a convoluted series of events.

Microsoft, in an effort to catch up with AWS, needed to bring on as many VMware customers as possible to its cloud solutions. CloudSimple was created by Guru Pangal, an entrepreneur who spent four years working for Microsoft on Azure. Microsoft and VMware had been rivals for some time. As a result, Microsoft’s plan was to use the newly created CloudSimple—also a VMware partner—as a conduit to migrate VMware workloads to Azure.

Michael Dell, CEO of the company bearing his name, stepped in to help smooth things out between the two companies, helping Microsoft secure formal permission to run VMware on Azure. As part of the deal, however, Dell-owned Virtustream became the recommended method of migrating VMware to Azure, leaving CloudSimple out in the cold.

Google saw an opportunity and formed a partnership with CloudSimple in August with the aim of helping companies migrate onsite VMware workloads to Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple.

“Through our existing partnership with CloudSimple, our customers can migrate their VMware workloads from on-premises datacenters directly into Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, while also creating new VMware workloads as needed. Their apps can run exactly the same as they have been on-premises, but with all the benefits of the cloud, like performance, elasticity, and integration with key cloud services and technologies. And best of all, customers can do all this without having to re-architect existing VMware-based applications and workloads, which helps them operate more efficiently and reduce costs, while also allowing IT staff to maintain consistency and use their existing VMware tools, workflows and support. To that end, we believe in a multi-cloud world and will continue to provide choice for our customers to use the best technology in their journey to the cloud.”

Now that Google has acquired CloudSimple, it will be interesting to see if it can makeup lost ground against rivals Microsoft and Amazon.