Samsung targets IoT and cloud with Joyent acquisition

Deal offers San Francisco firm "scale" for future endeavours

Samsung has upped its game in cloud and IoT by acquiring US software and services company Joyent.

Joyent specialises in IaaS, PaaS, scalable object storage and virtualisation - all useful additions to Samsung's growing cloud portfolio.

Samsung said Joyent brings with it "an experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology validated by some of the largest Fortune 500 customers".

For its part, Joyent said the deal gives it the opportunity to expand its reach.

"Until today, we lacked one thing," wrote Joyent CEO Scott Hammond on Joyent's company blog. "We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market."

Samsung, he said, will provide Joyent the "scale" it needs, becoming an "anchor tenant" for Triton - Joyent's converged data centre infrastructure and container solution - as well as its Manta object storage service. Hammond also believes being part of Samsung will mean an expansion of Joyent's "worldwide data centre footprint".

Joyent, which was founded in 2004 by Canadian entreprenuer Dean Allen, also helped finance and develop the Node.js open source cross-platform runtime environment for server-side web applications.

As a JavaScript interpreter, Node.js uses Google's V8 JavaScript engine, which is also a fine addition for Android mobile-focused Samsung.

Hammond, together with Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill and VP of product Bill Fine, is moving to Samsung to work on "company-wide cloud initiatives".

The obvious potential impact of this acquisition for Samsung - and its customers - is further development of Samsung's mobile and IoT services. Having already acquired automation and IoT firm SmartThings in 2014 for $200m, and launching subsequent IoT platforms, the South Korean giant is clearly serious about claiming the top spot as mobile opens out into the big data and analytics-driven future.