Samsung Ventures Makes Strategic Investment in Cloudant

Samsung is looking to step up its mobile cloud game. Not gaming apps in this case, but technologies related to global distribution and mobile applications data management. The company that has been giving Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) a run for its money in the smartphone world (not to mention duking it out in court) has made a strategic investment through Samsung Venture Investment Corp. in database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider Cloudant.

Details are a little fuzzy as to how much of an investment Samsung Ventures has made in Cloudant, which has made news recently here on Talkin’ Cloud related to its launch of a NoSQL DBaaS offering on Rackspace and the more recent news of SoftLayer announcing it was using Cloudant NoSQL to power its SoftLayer Message Queue Service.

Of course, Samsung has incredible momentum in the smartphone and tablet mobile device categories. In much of the world, it’s besting Apple’s iPhone, although the iPad still seems to have the numbers to hold onto the tablets crown. That said, as Apple has seen a softening of iPad sales, Samsung’s sales are soaring in the tablet world. Samsung has also made an interesting move into the Chromebooks market and is pushing ahead into the global education market with its new devices.

Perhaps the investment in Cloudant will give Samsung the edge it needs to push its mobile cloud strategy forward. At the very least, it should find ways to improve its features and functions for enterprise deployments of its mobile solutions.

“Samsung Ventures believes a globally distributed data layer and management of that data is especially critical for large enterprise businesses,” said Hyuk-Jeen Suh, senior investment manager at Samsung Ventures America, in a prepared statement. “We felt that this is the right time to strategically invest in Cloudant to support the company’s vision to manage the proliferation of data to be created by, for example, mobile devices, machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies, and the ‘Internet of things’ in the future.”

The investment in Cloudant also aligns well with Samsung’s continued investments in startup companies, which is helping it become less of a business focused strictly on hardware and more of a services business. In this day and age of slumping hardware sales (okay, maybe not in the smartphone category), that’s a good move, especially when that move includes investing in the rapidly growing mobile cloud market.