No, we don’t think that Samsung wants to compete with the cloud big four comprising Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Google, but the smartphone maker has nonetheless entered the cloud space in a significant way.
Announcing a key acquisition in prominent public and private cloud provider Joyent today, Samsung has just joined the ranks of several deep-pocket technology companies moving into a growing cloud industry.
Samsung is best known for its wide range of pocket-friendly and premium smartphones, but the company is essentially an electronics manufacturer. Home appliances, smart home and security monitoring products are just some of their other core business lines that have penetrated markets all over the world.
Says Scott Hammond, CEO of Joyent, of the deal:
“We are excited to join the Samsung family. Samsung brings us the scale we need to grow our cloud and software business, an anchor tenant for our industry leading Triton container-as-a-service platform and Manta object storage technologies, and a partner for innovation in the emerging and fast growing areas of mobile and IoT, including smart homes and connected cars.”
As the world of interconnected devices grow, the need for electronic devices talking to each other is growing, and companies all over the world are taking advantage of such a world. Internet of Things is one of the key industries that is actually building and managing that future in many ways. As part of the cloud initiative, IoT works to harvest data from devices embedded with sensors, cameras and other data-capture devices, and transmit them on the cloud via the Internet. The data can be used to create actionable intelligence that can drive efficiency and control costs, among other benefits.
Samsung is a natural fit for the Internet of Things because it is already associated with the devices that gather such data. The data movement and exploitation is where cloud computing comes in – the main reason why Joyent is such a strategic acquisition for the Korean electronics company. Joyent effectively fills the gap and will allow Samsung to build out an end to end system implementation for IoT.
The Internet of Things is projected to have an economic impact of between $7 and $10 trillion dollars over the next five years, and Samsung clearly wants in.
