Last week I met Ed Saipatech and Bryan Cantrill at Joyent’s new HQ in San Francisco.
It was an opportunity to get an update on their strategy, especially after some tweets and half words I intercepted on Internet about the development of their platform. Moreover, I was very curious about their future proposition in the object storage space.
(Cloud) object storage is increasing its importance every day. For example, if you look at Amazon, the public cloud market leader, S3 is the most successful service of their entire product lineup.
I’ve already written about Joyent in the past. It isn’t an ordinary cloud provider (actually, they define themselves a cloud solution provider) and, in fact, they have two souls: one is to act as a cloud provider and the other one is to propose software solutions to implement clouds. At the moment a big hole in their proposition is the object storage.
Joyent is very committed to the developing their cloud OS (SmartOS: an opensolaris fork with some interesting add ons) in order to provide the full stack to the customer. The result of this approach is that, like Apple in the consumer space, they are working to provide the best user experience to their customers.
Regarding object storage, they are looking around to understand real end user needs and then build an innovative solution that is well integrated to their stack!
The bad part of this story is that I’ve promised not to say what they are doing! It’s a shame, but I would like to add a couple of points before leaving:
- I’ll repeat myself again while saying: if you are thinking about a public or private cloud strategy, you should also consider them.
- these two old articles (here and here, translated with google) are a worth read. I wrote them some time ago but I’m sure they can help you form a vague idea of the developments they are carrying on: exciting!
Bottom line
From my point of view, they are not in direct competition with other big cloud providers, like Rackspace or Amazon, because they are working more on the quality of their cloud rather then mere volumes: they haven’t chosen the easiest path, but I’m sure they could succeed!
Disclaimer: I haven’t received any retribution to write this post, I’m only a fan 🙂
