Joyent Inc. was a software and services company based in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. Specializing in

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...

, it marketed infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by

Samsung Electronics Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (, sometimes shortened to SEC and stylized as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean multinational electronics corporation headquartered in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, South Korea. It is the pinnacle of the Samsung chaebol, a ...

Services

Triton, Joyent's hosting unit, was designed to compete with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and offered infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and

platform as a service Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing ...

(PaaS) for large enterprises. This hosting business was used for online social network gaming, where it provides services to companies such as

THQ THQ Inc. was an American video game company based in Agoura Hills, California. It was founded in April 1990 by Jack Friedman, originally in Calabasas, and became a public company the following year through a reverse merger takeover. Initi ...

, Social Game Universe, and Traffic Marketplace. The company also hosted

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

in its early days. Other customers include

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...

Gilt Groupe Gilt is an online shopping and lifestyle website based in the United States, launched in 2007. On January 7, 2016, The company was sold to Hudson's Bay Company for approximately $250 million. Prior to the Hudson’s Bay acquisition, sales were ex ...

, and

Kabam Kabam (formerly Watercooler, Inc.) is an interactive entertainment company founded in 2006 and headquartered in Vancouver, BC. with offices in Montréal, QC, San Francisco, CA and Austin, Texas. The company creates, develops and publishes massive ...

. In June 2013 Joyent introduced an

object storage Object storage (also known as object-based storage) is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data a ...

service under the name Manta and partnered in September 2013 with network appliance vendor

Riverbed A stream bed or streambed is the bottom of a stream or river (bathymetry) or the physical confine of the normal water flow ( channel). The lateral confines or channel margins are known as the stream banks or river banks, during all but flood ...

to offer an inexpensive content-delivery network. In February 2014, Joyent announced a partnership with

Canonical The adjective canonical is applied in many contexts to mean "according to the canon" the standard, rule or primary source that is accepted as authoritative for the body of knowledge or literature in that context. In mathematics, "canonical examp ...

to offer virtual

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

machines.

Software

Joyent uses and supports open source projects, including Node.js,

Illumos Illumos (stylized as illumos) is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device d ...

and

SmartOS SmartOS is a free and open-source SVR4 hypervisor based on the UNIX operating system that combines OpenSolaris technology with Linux's KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributed to the illumos project. It features several technologies: C ...

, which is its own distribution of Illumos, featuring its port of the KVM Hypervisor for abstracting the software from the hardware,

DTrace DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released und ...

for troubleshooting and systems monitoring, and the ZFS file system to connect servers to storage systems. The company open-sourced SmartOS in August 2011. 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") to large hardware companies such as Dell.

History

The name Joyent was coined by David Paul Young in the second half of 2004, and some early funding obtained from

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in F ...

. More funding was disclosed in July 2005 with Young as executive officer and director. One of the early products was an online collaboration tool named Joyent Connector, an unusually large

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and we ...

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. In November 2005, Joyent merged with

TextDrive TextDrive was founded in 2004 by the Canadian typographer, art director, designer, writer and programmer Dean Allen, the creator of Textile markup, who was looking to create an ideal hosting environment for the content management system he was dev ...

. 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. 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, leading to a focus on cloud computing software and services to service providers. Allen left the company in 2007. Young left the company in May 2012, and Hoffman took over as interim chief executive until the appointment of Henry Wasik in November 2012. Hoffman stepped down from his position as the company's chief technical officer in September 2013 and took a new position at

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in informa ...

the next month. Bryan Cantrill was appointed CTO in his place in April 2014, with Mark Cavage assuming Cantrill's former VP engineering role. The company has a history of acquisitions and divestments. In 2009, Joyent acquired Reasonably Smart, a cloud

startup company A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend ...

with products based on

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

and

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

. In 2009, it sold off both Strongspace and Bingodisk to ExpanDrive. In 2010, Joyent purchased LayerBoom, a Vancouver-based startup that provides solutions for managing virtual machines running on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

. On June 16, 2016,

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

announced that it was acquiring Joyent. On June 6, 2019, Joyent announced that their Triton public cloud would be shut down on November 9, 2019.

Financing

In 2004, TextDrive bootstrapped itself as a hosting company through

crowd funding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...

: customers were invited to invest money in exchange for free hosting for the lifetime of the company. TextDrive and, later, Joyent repeated the money-raising procedure a number of times in order to avoid the

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

market. and began to flounder, suffering from an absence of leadership and plagued by reliability issues, with users leaving for other hosts. Joyent raised venture capital for the first time in November 2009 from

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

and Dell. Joyent's early institutional investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures,

Intel Capital Intel Capital is a division of Intel Corporation, set up to manage corporate venture capital, global investment, mergers and acquisitions. Intel Capital makes equity investments in a range of technology startups and companies offering hardware, s ...

(series A, B Rounds),

Greycroft Partners Greycroft is an American venture capital firm. It manages over $2 billion in capital with investments in companies such as Bird, Bumble, HuffPost, Goop, Scopely, The RealReal, and Venmo. Greycroft was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof, Dana Set ...

(Series A, B Rounds), 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. In October 2014, Joyent raised an additional $15 million in series D funding from existing investors.

References

External links

Joyent
{{Cloud computing 2004 establishments in California American companies established in 2004 Samsung software Software companies of the United States Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies established in 2004 2016 mergers and acquisitions American subsidiaries of foreign companies Cloud computing providers Companies based in San Francisco Samsung Electronics