Samsung has its head in the cloud with its latest acquisition

Samsung announced today that it has made a deal to acquire Joyent, a U.S.-based provider of cloud computing solutions, for an undisclosed sum of money. In a statement issued to the media, the company says it will use the company’s expertise to support and grow its lineup of mobile and internet of things (IoT) products and services.

At first glance, the deal appears more reactionary than forward thinking — after all, it seems every tech company is doing something related to cloud storage — but there’s good reason Samsung plans to buy Joyent.

According to Engadget, the conglomerate depends on AWS, Amazon’s cloud company, to provide cloud storage to its customers and power some of its mobile apps. Moving forward, Samsung will be able to instead turn to a company it owns to accomplish those tasks.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how this acquisition affects the company’s smartphone business. We’ve seen companies like Apple continue to ship smartphones with miniscule amounts of internal storage mostly as a way to incentivize users to subscribe to its iCloud service. For Samsung, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of solid state storage and previously without a cloud storage solution of its own, it didn’t make a lot of sense to push its customers in that direction. With the Joyent acquisition, the calculus of that decision changes somewhat.

As TechCrunch notes, this is the third U.S.-based tech company Samsung has acquired in as many years. Previously, the company acquired IoT provider SmartThings and then LoopPay, the company behind its mobile payments solution. In those two previous cases, both acquisitions opened up new business opportunities to the South Korean giant.

[source]Samsung[/source][via]TechCrunch[/via]