Samsung may have made a name for itself in the smartphones and tablets market but sales for its mobile devices have been waning as competition intensifies. Smartphones adoption has also reached saturation point which means it’s a lot harder to shift units, so it makes sense that Samsung would want to get into the lucrative business of cloud computing. The company has just acquired a cloud services business called Joyent. Here’s what you need to know.
Samsung event image from Shutterstock
According to a statement from Samsung CTO of the mobile communications business Injong Rhee, the company had been eyeing out public and private cloud companies for a while before settling on Joyent:
“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.”
For those who haven’t heard of Joyent, don’t worry; you’re not the only one. It’s a public and private cloud hosting services company, similar to offerings by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. But what makes Joyent special is this:
“The Joyent team pioneered public cloud computing (and hybrid cloud), nurtured and grew Node.js into a de facto standard for web, mobile and IoT architectures, and was among the first to embrace and industrialise containers, compute-centric object storage, and what is now coming to be known as serverless computing.”
That’s from Joyent’s official website. The Node.js bit is important as Joyent is the original corporate steward for the Javascript runtime that is used by a plethora of web apps and mobile apps. The company also hosts services for a range of Fortune 500 companies. For now, Joyent will operate as a standalone company and take advantage of Samsung’s scale of business to grow.
Samsung itself can benefit from Joyent’s cloud resources as the company is one of the biggest consumers of public cloud data and storage. The company did not reveal the cost of the acquisition.
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