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Samsung has agreed to acquire California-based cloud provider Joyent, adding another cloud platform to the Korean giant’s ever-increasing portfolio of mobile, cloud and IoT services.
The move came after Samsung assessed a “wide range of potential companies in the public and private cloud infrastructure space”, and saw Joyent as the standout with an “experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology,” according to Samsung mobile communications CTO Injong Rhee.
From Joyent’s perspective, CEO Scott Hammond and CTO Bryan Cantrill both chipped in with their reasons for the deal. “Until today, we lacked one thing,” Hammond wrote in a blog post. “We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market. Now that changes.” Naturally, Cantrill looked at the news from more of a technologist’s perspective. “As our engineering teams got to know one another, we found that beneath the exciting vision was a foundation of shared values: we both cared deeply about not only innovation but also robustness – and that we both valued complete understanding when systems misbehaved,” Cantrill wrote.
“The more we got to know one another, the clearer it became that together we could summon a level of scale, agility and innovation that would be greater than the sum of our parts – that together, our technology could create a new titan of container-native computing,” he added.
Like a lot of these deals, the original intent was not acquisition; Samsung had previously examined Manta, Joyent’s object storage system, for implementation but, as Cantrill noted, Joyent had never seen a request at such scale. When Joyent went back to Samsung and explained they did not have sufficient hardware to perform the requested test, Samsung provided it – and the rest, it appears, was history.
“We work closely with startups to bring new software and services into Samsung, and one of the ways we do this is by driving strategic acquisitions,” said David Eun, Samsung global innovation centre president. “Joyent is a great example of a leading and disruptive technology company that will make unique contributions to Samsung while benefitting from Samsung’s global scale and reach.”
Joyent will continue as a standalone brand after the acquisition, while financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.