Samsung buys cloud infrastructure provider Joyent, will keep it operating as standalone company

Samsung today announced that it has acquired Joyent, a company with public cloud infrastructure and private cloud software, both of which can be used to build and deploy applications. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Joyent will continue to operate as a standalone company, Samsung said in a statement.

“Until today, we lacked one thing. We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market. Now, that changes,” Joyent CEO Scott Hammond wrote in a blog post on the news.

Rumors about Joyent getting bought have circulated for years. Now, finally, it has happened.

Samsung uses Joyent’s services and will help Joyent expand its data center footprint — of course, Samsung has a known brand name and money to invest, and those two things could help Joyent become more popular. Joyent could even potentially become a challenger to the top three cloud infrastructure providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform. But this has proven to be a challenging market: Dell, HP, and Rackspace have stepped away from the public cloud to focus on other areas.

In the private cloud arena there are other companies to contend with, including VMware, Microsoft, and Red Hat.

Joyent last raised funding in 2014. Investors include El Dorado Ventures, EPIC Ventures, Intel Capital, LGI Ventures, Orascom TMT Investments, and Rally Ventures. (Disclosure: Rally Ventures is an investor in VentureBeat.)

San Francisco-based Joyent started in 2004. Cofounder Jason Hoffman left his position as chief technology officer in September 2013 and joined Ericsson. Joyent was the original steward of server-side JavaScript framework Node.js and helped establish the Node.js Foundation in 2015. Joyent itself has made acquisitions, including TextDrive.

Joyent’s customers include Nerve, Paper Culture, Quizlet, Storify, and Wanelo.