On October 28, 2009 Joyent announced the launch of a cloud computing platform in China:
“Joyent becomes China’s first Cloud Computing vendor at a time where computing infrastructure is in very high demand. The company’s data center is located in the Qinhuangdao Economic and Technological Development Zone (QETDZ), Hebei Province, China. This announcement coincides with the QETDZ’s Investment Attraction Week.
“China is the world’s fastest growing economy and Joyent is there with the country’s first local Cloud Computing offering”, said David Young, CEO and Founder of Joyent. “This is definitely a very exciting and positive move for Joyent. We would especially like to thank our partners, QETDZ and Intel for their support in making this expansion possible. We are looking forward to providing the Chinese developer community and China’s enterprises with world-leading Cloud Computing technology.””
In a related blog post, Joyent spoke of the initial offering, the customer base and the ethical considerations:
“Today, we have opened a limited service of the Joyent Cloud to customers within mainland China and will be opening to the general public later this year. We are happy to be working with Intel and the Qinhuangdao Economic and Technology Development Zone, to bring the best infrastructure cloud computing service to customers in the Peoples’ Republic of China.
Joyent offers the best cloud for one of the fastest growing economies in the world today. Joyent will be bringing our full line of services to mainland China. We have been very impressed by the entrepreneurial and geek spirit of customers we have meet in China. Further, we have been very impressed by the open spirit of the officials of the development zone as their vision leap frogs server-hugging infrastructure for the future of the cloud: Joyent. We are excited to bring the Joyeur spirit to China.
Does our presence in China represent an ethical problem for Joyent? Isn’t the Chinese government known for censoring the internet? How can Joyent take part in that system? By entering the Chinese market, Joyent is signing up to play by the rules of the Chinese market. Joyent’s presence in the Chinese marketplace is our commitment to participate in the on-going conversation that is China moving between the systems of the past, and the aspirations of Joyent’s customers of the future. Joyent could not participate in the Chinese market were this conversation not vibrant and developing brilliantly…”
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Briefly: Why is this important?
1. Global expansion, particularly to an enormous market such as China, represents a boon for cloud computing in general, and specifically, is a big win for Joyent.
2. Given China’s potential as a true economic power, read competitive threat, it’s interesting to consider how that might be accelerated by sharing computational resources, therefore decreasing lead times and capital outlays for individual enterprises.
