Samsung Electronics unveiled that it will purchase Joyent, a U.S.-based public and private cloud provider.
This should let Samsung tap into the growing cloud market, opening up doors for Internet of Things, software services, mobile support and even AI technologies.
The deal is mutually advantageous.
So far, the OEM was lacking in cloud software, which forced it to rely on third-parties. With Joyent aboard, Samsung is ready to self-supply its huge demand for cloud services. Joyent, which will remain as an independent company, will make use of Samsung's global reach to get additional clients easier.
By adding Samsung as a main customer, Joyent makes another step toward achieving the scale it requires to go toe to toe with Google and Amazon in the "rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market."
So far, Samsung has been using Amazon Web Services to cater to its mobile apps and services.
Samsung has evaluated a slew of companies from both the public and private cloud infrastructure before deciding on Joyent, said its Chief Technology Officer for mobile business, Injong Rhee. As the cloud provider features an experienced management team, and seeing how some of the biggest Fortune 500 clients are partners of Joyent, Samsung took a fully committed decision.
The decision comes after Samsung Electronics and Samsung SDS tried several times to craft a proprietary cloud platform. Samsung did put efforts into building the storage service for Galaxy devices, but pulled the plug on the project after the company could not see eye to eye with a third-party storage provider.
Samsung seems to have learned from experience and understands that it is better to simply buy companies that have more know-how on a specific field. In 2015, the OEM purchased LoopPay, which became Samsung Pay, one of the company's big hits from recent years.
Another notable acquisition Samsung made was SmartThings, a startup that focuses on smart home tech. The venture, which still works with a big degree of autonomy inside Samsung's global unit, is now the foundation for the OEM's connected home offering. Samsung purchased SmartThings in August 2014.
"We've traditionally been more focused on hardware, but you're going to see more focus on software and services," Injong Rhee told the Wall Street Journal.
With this purchase, Samsung virtually becomes an anchor tenant for Joyent's solutions, dubbed Triton and Manta. As a reminder, Manta is its object storage technology, while Triton is a container-as-a-service platform.
