Will You Choose a Samsung Cloud?

In an effort to unhook its futures from AWS, Samsung has acquired Joyent for an undisclosed sum. Joyent is a US-based cloud platform based in San Francisco and founded in 2004. Samsung, the Korean company most recently notable for its hardware copycatting of the iPhone, will use its newly acquired cloud to power its apps and services, including mobility, IoT, and AI.

In a bit of what seems like an effort to try and one-up each other, both the CEO and CTO of Joyent have supplied separate perspectives on the acquisition:

From the Joyent CEO: Samsung acquires Joyent

From the Joyent CTO: Samsung acquires Joyent

There’s no indication if Samsung intends to offer customer-facing subscription services like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google but according to Joyent, those features already exist in its public offerings, including in its Triton product: Container Scheduling, Application Orchestration, Container Orchestration, and Cloud Orchestration and in its Manta product: is a highly scalable, distributed object storage service with integrated compute.

With the acquisition, Samsung enters a cloud race that has already been running strong with leaders that look to be unstoppable at this point. This is good news for Joyent, however. As the cloud wars continue, it becomes extremely hard for smaller organizations to compete and remain profitable for the long term. Most smaller, cloud-based companies work only to set themselves up to be acquired. I learned this last year at one of our sister events, HostingCon. Even the keynote speaker, who had sold his company to IBM, suggested during his speech to attendees that the endgame for any datacenter and hosting business is acquisition.