Google on Wednesday made two new acquisitions which look to have been done keeping the competition in mind. While there are few companies that can challenge Google at scale, the company made what appear to be strategic investments to shore up weaknesses in its very diverse portfolio.
Google is acquiring Appetas, as mentioned in a blog post by the company. Appetas is a site which restaurants can use to create their own websites, and integrate with services like GrubHub and Opentable, which lets them integrate bookings and reservations.
Appetas will be shutting down and the team will be building something new at Google.
At the same time, Google also acquired Stackdriver, a service that helps developers monitors apps and services that are being built and running in the cloud. In a blog post announcing this, Google Cloud Platform Product Manager Tom Kershaw writes, “The teams are going to be working to integrate Stackdriver’s great functionality so that Google Cloud Platform cusomers can take advantage of these new advanced monitoring capabilities.”
As noted by Gigaom, most of Stackdriver’s work is focused on Amazon Web Services, which is seen as a major challenge to Google on the cloud. This acquisition could be seen as a step to build a competitive advantage against Amazon, much like the Appetas buyout seems to be a hedge against sites like Yelp which are steadily gaining ground in restaurant information.
As TechCrunch notes, Appetas made it easy for businesses to create restaurant specific websites, while also integrating a lot of extra functions such as reservations and delivery systems, mobile websites and social media integration.
Google has already invested in Zagat for food-content in the past and in March, in a Google+ post, Google mentioned that search results would include restaurant menus (in the US only for now). The new acquisition could be a way of strengthening this offering even further.
