Joyent Acquires Reasonably Smart
I’m very excited to announce that Joyent has acquired the Montreal-based Reasonably Smart platform. James Duncan and Bryan Bogensberger, founders of the company and platform, have joined Joyent.
This acquisition comes at an important point in time for Joyent. We’ve just finished our best year, ever. Revenue doubled in 2008 from 2007 even as the economy continues to tank. Customers are moving spend from cap-ex to op-ex and Joyent products are ideally situated for this trend. However, more and more customers are expecting auto-scale from their cloud vendors and this acquisition allows Joyent to respond to those demands.
Reasonably Smart is an auto-scaling platform-as-a-service; it is a direct, open-source competitor to Google App Engine. We believe the future of cloud computing is found in open, transparent platforms that allow customers to move between clouds easily, if desired. Unfortunately, that is not the case for most cloud vendors today. This acquisition underscores Joyent’s commitment to customers and their interests in cloud computing.
This acquisition also underscores a bet that Javascript will become the language of scale for the web. When I talk of scale, I don’t only mean “big” but also “very small” since most applications developed are used by a handful of people from time-to-time. The platform will support other languages in the coming months, but we feel confident that Javascript is a very competent first start.
I want to welcome James Duncan and Bryan Bogensberger to Joyent. James will continue to develop the platform. He has been a champion and contributor of open source for many years and has experience in building platforms at enormous scale. Bryan will be serving as Joyent’s VP of Marketing. Jason Hoffman and I knew they both were great fits for Joyent since they like to have fun and they are passionate about doing what is right for customers.
The Reasonably Smart platform is off-line for a couple months while we integrate it with Joyent backend services. Meanwhile, please sign up at http://reasonablysmart.com (running on Joyent Accelerators) to allow us to keep you informed of progress.
10 Responses
Awesome! Congrats to both parties.
Now I’d like to see Joyent partner with GitHub and offer discounts on accounts!
@David
Curious to know, is Joyent’s target market now enterprise customers or small businesses as it use to be?
I only ask because some of us (small business / design firms) feel like you have forgotten about us and have moved on to bigger customers.
I only say that because of the lack of Joyeur posts and morale felt in the Joyent forums.
Plus, accelerator pricing is no longer looking as good when Linode/Slicehost are nearly 1/2 your price now
@Tim
The vast majority of our customers are small teams, small businesses.
It’s important to not that with the bursting we allow for Accelerators, customers can and often do get much more CPU performance than in paid for.
Hmm, now I’m curious about reasonably smart, but I’ll have to wait to have a look at it.
From the RS site: “Write your UI in HTML, and your server-side code in JavaScript.”
Wait, that’s it?
Doesn’t sound at all like what Dave was talking about in May:
Dave, can you sell this better somehow? Show how it will fit in with the cloud-computing principles you talked about?
@David Reese: we haven’t changed. But we have expanded.
Awesome news and an excellent strategic fit. Congrats to both parties!
Congratulations James, Bryan and Joyent.
Wishing you great success and look forward to the release of RSP.
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