Telefónica has signed a strategic partnership with Joyent, a provider of cloud services and technologies. The partnership sees Telefónica making a strategic equity investment in Joyent that, in turn, gives it access to the Joyent technologies and software for the deployment of cloud services.
Telefónica said that cloud-based services are a key focus area for its Digital unit. It sees Joyent’s technology expertise as helping it to enhance its product offering particularly for SMEs and SoHo customers. Joyent has over 12,000 public cloud customers in the US.
“This investment is further proof of our ambition in the area of cloud services and our strategy of working with the most innovative start-ups,” said Matthew Key, Chairman & CEO, Telefónica Digital. “Joyent’s technology fits perfectly with our in-house developed technologies and our cloud services model and enables us to provide more competitive offerings to a broader range of customer segments.”
“This strategic partnership and funding will enable us to expand our product offering to more regions and to evolve our products, taking advantage of the service provider vision brought by Telefonica” said David Young, founder and CEO of Joyent.
This is the second investment made by Telefónica Ventures (a division of Telefonica Digital) since Telefónica Digital was created in September 2011 to lead Telefónica’s growth strategy in the digital world. The first investment, made in November 2011, saw Telefónica make a strategic equity investment in WiFi home networking specialist Quantenna.