Samsung Buys Cloud Provider Joyent To Boost IoT, Connected Car Business

Samsung has acquired Joyent, a San Francisco-based public and private cloud provider, for an undisclosed sum.

With the purchase, Samsung has bought access to its very own cloud platform that it said will support its growing range of IoT, mobile, and cloud software and services products.

“…until today, we lacked one thing. We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market. Now, that changes,” said Joynet CEO Scott Hammond in a blog post this week.

Containers

Joyent, which competes with providers such as VMware and Red Hat in the private cloud space, now gets to use Samsung as an anchor tenant for its Triton container-as-a-service platform and Manta object storage product. Joyent will also get a look-in at Samsung’s smart home and connected car businesses.

Samsung said that Joyent will continue as a standalone company, growing its data centre footprint with the help of Samsung’s global scale.

“Joyent’s unique combination of container-native infrastructure, object storage, server-less computing, and Node.js expertise is perfectly suited to help Samsung meet the needs of its customers,” said Samsung in a statement.

“As one of the world’s largest consumers of public cloud data and storage, Samsung will immediately benefit from having direct access to Joyent’s technology, leadership and talent.”

Joyent completes a hat trick of US acquisition for Samsung in recent years. In 2014, the mobile giant bought IoT home appliance company SmartThings, and in 2015 it bought Apple Pay competitor LoopPay.

“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.

A number of Joyent cloud peers have been acquired by larger companies in the past. SoftLayer was acquired by IBM to boost its cloud business in 2013, with SoftLayer now a crucial part of IBM’s worldwide strategy.

“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,” said Rhee.

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