Samsung Announces Acquisition Of Joyent For Undisclosed Sum

Samsung (SSNLF) has announced that it will purchase Joyent, an 11-year-old company that is a cloud provider and container pioneer. According to a statement from the companies, Joyent will operate as an independent subsidiary within Samsung and will use Samsung’s global reach to acquire additional clients. Several of Joyent’s key executives will join Samsung’s executive branch, including CEO Scott Hammond, CTO Bryan Cantrill, and VP of Product Bill Fine. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The move makes sense for Samsung. Joyent is a vital but lesser-known player the cloud hosting market. Samsung currently uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide its cloud infrastructure and services. With Joyent aboard, Samsung is ready to self-supply its huge demand for cloud services.

Samsung is turning its focus to building and delivering broad-scale, consumer-grade mobile solutions. Samsung’s intention is to use Joyent to power its growing mobile IP business. Container technology is currently the favored solution for that task. Software containers make applications more portable between developer laptops and the cloud, as well as between different cloud computing environments.

Joyent’s ability to innovate around containers and scalable object storage makes it a very attractive acquisition. The technology is well-suited to delivering high-scale mobile apps due to its ability to quickly virtualize dedicated app environments and scale them without the need for server or hypervisor overhead. Providers using containers can develop new apps quickly and then provision those app containers much faster than with other services.

Joyent is perhaps best known for creating a software development platform called Node.js, one of the most popular programming tools on the planet today. Node.js made it easy for developers to build server-side software using JavaScript. Today, Node.js is used by companies ranging from tiny startups to Wal-Mart to NASA and is largely responsible for making JavaScript the most widely used programming language in the world. Today, containers are a cornerstone technology for companies like Microsoft and Google.

Samsung stated in its press release that it was interested in Joyent because of that company’s “unique combination of container-native infrastructure, object storage, server-less computing, and Node.js expertise.” Cantrill says Samsung was very interested in Node.js and Triton, Joyent’s cutting-edge Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering. Joyent also has an object Storage-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution called Manta.