Joyent

Joyent Inc.
Public
Industry Computer Software
Genre Cloud infrastructure
Founded 2004
Headquarters San Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people
  • Scott Hammond (CEO)
  • Bryan Cantrill (CTO)
  • Steve Tuck (SVP Sales)
  • Bill Fine (VP of Product & Marketing)
  • Angela Fong (VP Engineering)
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. The company specializes in application virtualization and cloud computing. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics.[2]

Services

Triton, Joyent’s hosting unit, is designed to compete with Amazon's EC2 cloud[3] and offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) for large enterprises.

This hosting business is active in the segment of 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] 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 has taken the software stack that evolved over time in the running of their hosted business and is now licensing that software under the name Smart Data Center[3] to large hardware companies such as Dell.[15][16]

History

Joyent was founded by David Paul Young in the fall of 2004[17] and incorporated in July 2005 with Young as Executive Officer and Director.[18] Some of the early seed money came from Peter Thiel.

One of the early products was an online collaboration tool named Joyent Connector,[19] an unusually large Ruby on Rails application, which was demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Conference in October 2005,[20] launched in March 2006,[21] open sourced in 2007,[22] and discontinued in August 2011.[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 solutions for managing virtual machines running on Windows and Linux.[36]

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

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.[37] TextDrive and, later, Joyent repeated the money-raising procedure a number of times in order to avoid the venture capital market.[38][39][40] Joyent raised venture capital for the first time in November 2009[41] from Intel and Dell.[42] Joyent's early institutional investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Peter Thiel (Seed Round),[43] Intel Capital (Series A, B Rounds),[44] Greycroft Partners (Series A, B Rounds),[45] 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.[46] In October 2014, Joyent raised an additional $15 million in Series D funding from existing investors.[47]

Lifetime hosting crisis and relaunch of TextDrive

On August 16, 2012, individuals who had provided start-up and development funding to TextDrive in exchange for lifetime shared hosting accounts were informed, via email, that their lifetime hosting accounts would be deleted on October 31, 2012.[48] Depending on the nature of their initial investment, they were offered either one or three free years of hosting on a Joyent SmartMachine,[49] the company's cloud hosting solution, after which they would be moved to a regularly billed account. Customer backlash to the announcement turned out to be fierce.[38]

On August 30, 2012, Textdrive co-founder Dean Allen announced that he was relaunching TextDrive as a separate company which would carry on Joyent's shared hosting business and honor the "lifetime" agreements.[29][50] Allen relaunched TextDrive on November 1, 2012, using Joyent infrastructure. He was confident he would succeed in building a viable business similar to DreamHost.[51]

However, TextDrive was spun out of Joyent in February 2013[40] and began to flounder, suffering from an absence of leadership and plagued by reliability issues, with users leaving for other hosts.[40] The possibility for new users to sign up for TextDrive 2.0 never did come to pass.

On the morning of March 3, 2014, Allen removed all but a logo and an image from textdrive.com and placed the TextDrive Discussion Forum discuss.textdrive.com in maintenance mode with the following announcement (emphasis added).[52]

As anyone looking for decent support or even useful information over the past few months can attest, the revival of TextDrive has not been a success.

What began in mid-2012 as an exciting challenge fuelled by good intentions and lean resources quickly turned into a cleanup project with almost no resources. It is disappointing to report that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks, after several costly efforts to regroup and find another way, options to keep TextDrive growing have run out, and we will cease operations on the 14th of March, 2014. For those who wish to know, details of what went wrong will be made available once shutdown operations have completed. Sorry to have let you down.

Dean

See also

References

  1. 1 2 https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-to-acquire-joyent-a-leading-public-and-private-cloud-provider
  2. ↑ "Joyent | Samsung acquires Joyent". www.joyent.com. Retrieved 2017-01-02.
  3. 1 2 3 4 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. 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. 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. 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. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
  14. ↑ Higginbotham, Stacey (August 15, 2011). "Joyent launches a new OS for the Cloud". GigaOm. 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. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
  17. ↑ Young, David (2016-06-17). "A Brief History of Joyent". davidpaulyoung.com. David Paul Young. Retrieved 2016-06-23.
  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.
  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. 1 2 "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. Retrieved 2014-04-04.
  28. ↑ Allen, Dean (2008-04-09). "Alright". Textism. Archived from the original on April 9, 2008.
  29. 1 2 Higginbotham, Stacey (August 30, 2012). "A user revolt and the second coming of TextDrive". GigaOm. Retrieved August 30, 2012.
  30. 1 2 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. 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. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
  35. ↑ Malik, Om (August 13, 2009). "Startup Joyent Sells BingoDisk and Strongspace". Gigaom.com.
  36. ↑ Higginbotham, Stacey (2010-07-15). "Joyent Buys Layerboom to Offer Enterprises Easier Transition to the Cloud". Gigaom.com. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
  37. ↑ "History of TextDrive". The Unofficial TextDrive Wiki. November 12, 2006. Archived from the original on January 7, 2009. Retrieved September 3, 2012.
  38. 1 2 Sherman, Erik (August 29, 2012). "The Tricky Business of Lifetime Guarantees". Inc.com. Retrieved August 29, 2012.
  39. ↑ Lindsay, Adam T. (March 4, 2007). "Lifetime plans". The Unofficial TextDrive Wiki. Archived from the original on December 3, 2008. Retrieved August 29, 2012.
  40. 1 2 3 Finley, Klint (2014-03-04). "Why Turning Your Customers Into 'Mini-VCs' Isn't a Great Idea". Wired.com. Retrieved 2014-04-03.
  41. ↑ Young, David (November 17, 2009). "Joyent Raises Institutional Money: Why We Did It". Joyeur.
  42. ↑ Malik, Om (November 17, 2009). "How Much Money Did Joyent Really Raise?". GigaOm. Retrieved 30 August 2012.
  43. ↑ "Joyent | CrunchBase Profile". Crunchbase.com. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
  44. ↑ Hardawar, Devindra (September 14, 2010). "Joyent lands another $15M for cloud computing services". Venture Beat. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
  45. ↑ "Joyent Secures $15 Million in Series C Funding". PR Newswire. September 2014. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
  46. ↑ Darrow, Barb (January 23, 2012). "Cloud provider Joyent gets $85 million for global expansion". GigaOm. Retrieved August 31, 2012.
  47. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic. "Joyent Raises $15M To Bring Enterprise-Grade Docker Support To Its Cloud Platform". www.TechCrunch.com. Retrieved 31 October 2014.
  48. ↑ Finley, Klint (August 16, 2012). "Cloud Computing Company Joyent Leaves Early Supporters Out In The Cold". Techcrunch. Retrieved August 24, 2012.
  49. ↑ Butler, Brandon (August 19, 2012). "Cloud Company Ending 'Lifetime' Hosting promise". PC World. Retrieved August 19, 2012.
  50. ↑ Henderson, Nicole (August 30, 2012). "TextDrive Separates from Joyent to Continue Lifetime Web Hosting Deal". Webhost Industry Review. Retrieved August 30, 2012.
  51. ↑ Henderson, Nicole (September 5, 2012). "Inside CEO Dean Allen's Plans for a Resurrected TextDrive Hosting Service". Webhost Industry Review. Retrieved September 6, 2012.
  52. ↑ Hamilton, David (2014-03-10). "TextDrive 'Lifetime' Customer Accounts to End This Week". Web Host Industry Review. Retrieved 2014-04-03.
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