Samsung Acquires Cloud Startup Joyent, Commits to Keeping Platform Open Source

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Samsung has acquired Joyent to use its cloud platform to support its mobile and IoT services, the companies announced Wednesday. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Joyent will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary, with Samsung as an “anchor tenant” for its Triton container-as-a-service platform and Mantra object storage technology. Joyent executives Scott Hammond, CEO, Bryan Cantrill, CTO, and Bill Fine, VP of Product will join Samsung to work on cloud company-wide.

“Samsung evaluated a wide range of potential companies in the public and private cloud infrastructure space with a focus on leading-edge scalable technology and talent. In Joyent, we saw an experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology validated by some of the largest Fortune 500 customers,” said Injong Rhee, CTO of the Mobile Communications business at Samsung Electronics.

The Korean electronics giant identified Joyent’s container-native infrastructure, object storage, serverless computing, and Node.js expertise as valuable strengths of the company. Samsung also benefits from having direct access to Joyent as a major consumer of public cloud services.

For Joyent’s part, having paid its dues in several areas, including the development of public cloud, Node.js, and compute-centric object storage, the company is ready to fight for market share, and gains the resources to do so.

“We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market,” Joyent CEO Scott Hammond said in a blog post.

Joyent CTO Brian Cantrill said that over the years, many computing infrastructure companies came calling, but Samsung’s commitment to keeping it open source, as well as the scale it provides Joyent, helped to seal the deal.

“In these conversations, it was clear that while impressed with our technology (and gratifyingly, always astonished with the strength of our small team), there was also a palpable sense of fear—as if their worst nightmare was that our technology would thrive under their aegis and pose a mortal threat to their existing (and more comfortable) lines of business. So the conversations—all initiated at their behest—went nowhere, and that always felt (frankly) like a relief,” he said in a blog post. “For me, these clumsy and conflicted courtships stood in stark contrast to the conversations with the companies and technologists actually trying to use cloud computing to solve big, thorny problems—conversations I have always found to be energizing, forward-looking and thought-provoking. And in the past year, with the introduction and enthusiastic reception of Triton, the conversations have taken on new scope and energy: our technology is increasingly viewed not as merely ‘an amazing work of engineering’, but as an essential foundation for a container-native future.”

The companies’ mutual interest in different elements of the mobile and IoT markets are complimentary, as well, and being the default networking provider for devices sold by Samsung could give Joyent an automatic seat at the table as the markets grow. Salesforce chose AWS to support the “uncontrolled exponential growth” of its IoT Cloud in May.

Hammond also said that Triton sales are doubling every quarter. Joyent added support for non-Docker containers to Triton a year ago. The company had raised $135 million in funding with a $15 million round in late 2014, shortly after former Cisco executive Hammond joined as CEO.

The deal is pending the usual closing conditions.

Original article appeared here: Samsung Acquires Cloud Startup Joyent, Commits to Keeping Platform Open Source