Joyent

Joyent Inc.

Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Computer Software
Genre	Cloud infrastructure
Founded	2004; 21 years ago (2004)
Headquarters	San Francisco, California , U.S.
Products	Triton Compute, Node.js, SmartOS
Number of employees	125 (June 2017)
Parent	Independent (2004–2016) Samsung (2016–present)[1]
Divisions	Cloud Software, Cloud Hosting
Website	www.joyent.com

Joyent Inc. is a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it markets infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics.^[2]

Services

Triton, Joyent's hosting unit, was designed to compete with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)^[3] and offered infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) for large enterprises.

This hosting business was used for online social network gaming,^[4] where it provides services to companies such as THQ,^[5] Social Game Universe, and Traffic Marketplace.

The company also hosted Twitter in its early days.^[6] Other customers include LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, and Kabam.^[3]

In June 2013 Joyent introduced an object storage service under the name Manta^[7] and partnered in September 2013 with network appliance vendor Riverbed to offer an inexpensive content-delivery network.^[8] In February 2014, Joyent announced a partnership with Canonical to offer virtual Ubuntu machines.^[9]

Software

Joyent uses and supports open source projects, including Node.js,^[10][11] pkgsrc, Illumos and SmartOS, which is its own distribution of Illumos,^[3] featuring its port of the KVM Hypervisor for abstracting the software from the hardware, DTrace for troubleshooting and systems monitoring, and the ZFS file system to connect servers to storage systems.^[12] The company open-sourced SmartOS in August 2011.^[13][14]

Joyent took software that evolved over time in the running of their hosted business and licensed that software under the name Triton DataCenter (formerly "Triton Enterprise", "SDC" or "SmartDataCenter")^[3] to large hardware companies such as Dell.^[15][16]

History

The name Joyent was coined by David Paul Young in the second half of 2004, and some early funding obtained from Peter Thiel.^[17] More funding was disclosed in July 2005 with Young as executive officer.^[18]

One of the early products was an online collaboration tool named Joyent Connector, an unusually large Ruby on Rails application, which was demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Conference in October 2005, launched in March 2006, open sourced in 2007, and discontinued in August 2011.^{[19][20][21][22][23]}

In November 2005, Joyent merged with TextDrive.^[24][25][26] Young became the chief executive of the merged company, while TextDrive CEO Dean Allen, a resident of France, became president and director of Joyent Europe.^[26]

Jason Hoffman (from TextDrive), serving as the merged company's chief technical officer, spearheaded the move from TextDrive's initial focus on application hosting to massively distributed systems,^[27] leading to a focus on cloud computing software and services to service providers. Allen left the company in 2007.^[28][29]

Young left the company in May 2012, and Hoffman took over as interim chief executive^[30] until the appointment of Henry Wasik in November 2012.^[31] Hoffman stepped down from his position as the company's chief technical officer in September 2013^[30] and took a new position at Ericsson the next month.^[32] Bryan Cantrill was appointed CTO in his place in April 2014, with Mark Cavage assuming Cantrill's former VP engineering role.^[33]

The company has a history of acquisitions and divestments. In 2009, Joyent acquired Reasonably Smart, a cloud startup company with products based on JavaScript and Git.^[34] In 2009, it sold off both Strongspace and Bingodisk to ExpanDrive.^[35] In 2010, Joyent purchased LayerBoom, a Vancouver-based startup that provides software for managing virtual machines running on Windows and Linux.^[36]

On June 16, 2016, Samsung announced that it was acquiring Joyent.^[1]

On June 6, 2019, Joyent announced that their Triton public cloud would be shut down on November 9, 2019.^[37][38]

On April 11, 2022, Joyent announced that MNX Solutions would be taking over the Triton DataCenter technology suite.^[39]

Financing

In 2004, TextDrive bootstrapped itself as a hosting company through crowd funding: customers were invited to invest money in exchange for free hosting for the lifetime of the company.^[40] TextDrive and, later, Joyent repeated the money-raising procedure a number of times in order to avoid the venture capital market.^[41][42][43] and began to flounder, suffering from an absence of leadership and plagued by reliability issues, with users leaving for other hosts.^[43] Joyent raised venture capital for the first time in November 2009^[44] from Intel and Dell.^[45] Joyent's early institutional investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Intel Capital (series A, B Rounds),^[46] Greycroft Partners (Series A, B Rounds),^[47] Liberty Global (Series B Round). In January 2012, Joyent secured a new round of funding totalling $85 million from Weather Investment II, Accelero Capital, and Telefónica Digital.^[48] In October 2014, Joyent raised an additional $15 million in series D funding from existing investors.^[49]

References

1. "Samsung to Acquire Joyent, a Leading Public and Private Cloud Provider".
2. "Joyent | Samsung acquires Joyent". www.joyent.com. Archived from the original on 2021-01-28. Retrieved 2017-01-02.
3. Metz, Cade (September 15, 2011). "Joyent arms cloud for death match with Amazon: Son of Solaris hypervisor locked and loaded". The Register. Retrieved September 2, 2012.
4. Harris, Derrick (2010-12-07). "Joyent Targets Large-Scale Online Gaming". Gigaom.com. Archived from the original on 2012-11-13. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
5. Chiang, Oliver (September 20, 2010). "THQ Partners with Cloud-Computing Provider Joyent, Upping Investment in Social Games". Forbes. Retrieved September 4, 2012.
6. Martin, Richard (August 1, 2007). "Joyent A-Twitter Preaching Its Shared Infrastructure". Information Week. Archived from the original on 6 August 2012. Retrieved 5 July 2012.
7. Clark, Jack; 25 Jun 2013 (2013-06-25). "Joyent spins up ZFS object store". The Register. Retrieved 2014-04-05.
8. Clark, Jack (2013-09-17). "Joyent turns cloud into a Riverbed content-delivery network". The Register. Retrieved 2014-04-05.
9. Jackson, Jacob (2014-02-20). "Joyent offers Canonical-customized Ubuntu as a cloud service". PCWorld. Retrieved 2014-04-07.
10. Thornsby, Jessica (November 10, 2010). "Node.js Moves to Joyent". Jaxenter. Archived from the original on 2012-03-10. Retrieved August 31, 2012.
11. Klint Finley (2011-03-03). "Joyent Relaunches Node.js Service, Announces Cloud Analytics". Readwriteweb.com. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
12. Babcock, Charles (July 9, 2012). "Joyent's Cloud Competes With Google, Amazon". Information Week. Retrieved September 7, 2012.
13. "Joyent Announces SmartOS With KVM: an Open Source, Modern Operating System". Market Wire. 2011-08-15. Archived from the original on 2013-06-05. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
14. Higginbotham, Stacey (August 15, 2011). "Joyent launches a new OS for the Cloud". GigaOm. Archived from the original on January 2, 2013. Retrieved August 31, 2012.
15. "Dell to Provide Joyent Cloud Software Solution to Service Providers". Bizcloud Network. 2010-11-19. Archived from the original on 2011-05-28. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
16. Malik, Om (2010-03-24). "For Dell, Joyent Weaves a Software Cloud". Gigaom.com. Archived from the original on 2020-06-18. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
17. Young, David (June 17, 2016). "A Brief History of Joyent". davidpaulyoung.com. David Paul Young. Archived from the original on August 26, 2016. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
18. DeGraff, Harold (2005-07-01). "Form D: Notice of Sale of Securities Pursuant to Regulation D, Section 4(6), and/or Uniform Limited Offering Exemption". SECdatabase.com.
19. Arrington, Michael (October 5, 2005). "The Companies of Web 2.0, Part 1". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
20. "Workshops". Web 2.0 Conference. October 5, 2005. Archived from the original on October 25, 2020. Retrieved September 6, 2012.
21. "Joyent Launches Web Based Collaboration Platform: Enables Teams to Easily Communicate and Share Information Using the Joyent Platform's Web Mail, Calendars, Contacts, and Files". PR Newswire. March 1, 2006. Archived from the original on March 21, 2006. Retrieved September 4, 2012.
22. Cooper, Peter (13 July 2013). "Joyent Slingshot and Connector Go Open Source". Retrieved 23 June 2016.
23. Coleman, Alan (September 27, 2011). "The end of Joyent Connector, now what for my contacts?". Web Dev & Creative Blog.
24. "Joyent Buys TextDrive". Alarmclock. November 28, 2005. Archived from the original on March 28, 2006.
25. "Joyent acquires TextDrive: Combines recognized innovators in Web 2.0 team collaboration software and advanced hosting services to lead the industry shift to network-based applications". PR Newswire. November 28, 2005. Retrieved September 4, 2012.
26. "Joyent Buys Web Host TextDrive". Webhost Industry Review. November 29, 2005. Retrieved September 1, 2012.
27. Higginbotham, Stacey (2012-10-12). "Doctor's dream: Jason Hoffman's quest to build the new web machine". Gigaom. Archived from the original on 2020-12-14. Retrieved 2014-04-04.
28. Allen, Dean (2008-04-09). "Alright". Textism. Archived from the original on April 9, 2008.
29. Higginbotham, Stacey (August 30, 2012). "A user revolt and the second coming of TextDrive". GigaOm. Archived from the original on November 2, 2012. Retrieved August 30, 2012.
30. Shu, Catherine (2013-09-09). "Joyent Co-Founder Jason Hoffman Steps Down As CTO of the Cloud Computing Pioneer". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2014-04-04.
31. Williams, Alex (2012-11-07). "Joyent Appoints New CEO And Pushes Out Joyent7 For The Emerging Scaled Out Enterprise". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2014-04-04.
32. Darrow, Barb (2013-10-26). "Jason Hoffman has landed: At Ericsson". Gigaom. Archived from the original on 2020-10-28. Retrieved 2014-04-04.
33. Cantrill, Bryan. "From VP of Engineering to CTO". dTrace.org. Retrieved 16 April 2014.
34. Malik, Om (2009-01-13). "Joyent Buys Reasonably Smart to Create Open-source Cloud". Gigaom.com. Archived from the original on 2020-09-24. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
35. Malik, Om (August 13, 2009). "Startup Joyent Sells BingoDisk and Strongspace". Gigaom.com. Archived from the original on August 8, 2020. Retrieved March 14, 2011.
36. Higginbotham, Stacey (2010-07-15). "Joyent Buys Layerboom to Offer Enterprises Easier Transition to the Cloud". Gigaom.com. Archived from the original on 2020-09-25. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
37. "Joyent Public Cloud EOL". Joyent.com. 2019-06-06. Archived from the original on 2020-11-08. Retrieved 2019-08-11.
38. Kieren McCarthy (June 7, 2019). "Samsung goes Marie Kondo on its public cloud outfit: Does this bring me Joyent? Nope. Then in the bin it goes". The Register. Retrieved September 29, 2021.
39. "A New Chapter Begins for Triton and SmartOS".
40. "History of TextDrive". The Unofficial TextDrive Wiki. November 12, 2006. Archived from the original on January 7, 2009. Retrieved September 3, 2012.
41. Sherman, Erik (August 29, 2012). "The Tricky Business of Lifetime Guarantees". Inc.com. Retrieved August 29, 2012.
42. Lindsay, Adam T. (March 4, 2007). "Lifetime plans". The Unofficial TextDrive Wiki. Archived from the original on December 3, 2008. Retrieved August 29, 2012.
43. Finley, Klint (2014-03-04). "Why Turning Your Customers Into 'Mini-VCs' Isn't a Great Idea". Wired.com. Retrieved 2014-04-03.
44. Young, David (November 17, 2009). "Joyent Raises Institutional Money: Why We Did It". Joyeur. Archived from the original on May 19, 2012. Retrieved August 29, 2012.
45. Malik, Om (November 17, 2009). "How Much Money Did Joyent Really Raise?". GigaOm. Archived from the original on 22 January 2020. Retrieved 30 August 2012.
46. Hardawar, Devindra (September 14, 2010). "Joyent lands another $15M for cloud computing services". Venture Beat. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
47. "Joyent Secures $15 Million in Series C Funding". PR Newswire. September 2014. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
48. Darrow, Barb (January 23, 2012). "Cloud provider Joyent gets $85 million for global expansion". GigaOm. Archived from the original on October 15, 2012. Retrieved August 31, 2012.
49. Lardinois, Frederic (31 October 2014). "Joyent Raises $15M To Bring Enterprise-Grade Docker Support To Its Cloud Platform". www.TechCrunch.com. Retrieved 31 October 2014.

External links

• Joyent