Diane Greene, senior vice president for Google Cloud, speaks at Google Cloud Next this morning. (Google Photo)

One of the bigger marketing software companies, Marketo, has decided its ready to ditch its servers and move into the cloud, and Google is getting the business.

The two companies announced a multiyear collaboration strategy Thursday that will see Marketo move its business onto Google Cloud Platform over the next couple of years, and Google will do some work to integrate Marketos products into G Suite. Forbes noted that Google provided migration incentives in order to sweeten the deal, which will further the notion that a lot of Googles major customer wins have come at the cost of steep discounts for its services.

Still, the multiyear agreement provides Google with another long-term customer that could help it woo others, especially other marketing companies. Marketo told Forbes that one of the main reasons it choose Google was because of its in-house marketing savvy as one of the biggest advertising brokers in the world, and that might be an interesting niche for Google to pursue as other software-as-a-service marketing companies plot out cloud strategies.

Marketos software is used by a lot of companies to manage their marketing operations, from lead generation to campaign measurement. It might have decided that it needed some IT assistance earlier this year when it somehow forgot to renew its domain name registration and went down for several hours until it could fix the problem.

Google has been making slow but steady process in its cloud efforts, as it tries to shed a reputation for lacking the enterprise sales touch that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft enjoy. It has stepped up its support of hybrid cloud strategies through deals with Nutanix and just this week lowered prices on networking costs for customers that dont require all the performance that Googles fiber network provides.

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Marketo decides to go all-in on cloud computing, and picks Google as its home - GeekWire