Today is a very important day for Joyent, and for software development.Joyent recognized early on that Web development was unlocking transformative new capabilities for software developers. We were founded with the idea of building applications to make business more productive, and we knew that Joyent needed infrastructure that could scale quickly to satisfy user demands, that could provide a persistent, stable platform for applications, and that could meet the day-to-day performance requirements needed to run a business.We quickly realized that the infrastructure needed to be successful in delivering those applications simply didn’t exist at the time. So rather than settling for an inadequate solution based on existing software, we built the infrastructure we needed. We bought the hardware, and started writing the software to make it possible to manage that hardware as efficiently as possible.That was the genesis for our public Cloud hosting business. And since we launched that business, it has been used as a springboard for many thousands of developers to build increasingly larger and more powerful applications. Companies like Gilt, Watercooler, and Linked In are all building on our public cloud.But our end goal has never been to be a hosting provider – there are plenty of those available around the world. Our goal has been to build a software platform that could enable unprecedented efficiency and manageability of infrastructure. Within Joyent, we often talk about that vision as a “fully-programmable data center”. We believe that when a platform is built that provides for a fully-programmable data center, it will allow Web developers to start thinking about the data center as a computer.This platform of the future will free developers them from thinking about the day-to-day details and complexity of coding to multiple servers across multiple networks. It will allow them to quickly spin-up and spin-down data centers in response to real-time demands from software applications that are increasingly permeating our daily life in our cell phones, laptops, PCs, and even our televisions, cars, refrigerators. It will make it possible to accomplish the “internet of things”.And while we’ve still got a long way to go in accomplishing that goal, earlier today, Joyent took another important step in that direction. Dell has chosen Joyent’s software as the core for their cloud solution for web applications. They aren’t building on Joyent as a hosted platform, but rather allowing anyone to build out a cloud like Joyent.com, using our software. That means that Joyent is now the first (and only) software company that manages its own infrastructure for a large-scale public cloud, has built the entire software platform for that public cloud, and makes the software available for anyone else to build their own cloud. Together Joyent and Dell are providing developers with even greater flexibility in how they can choose to deliver their applications – while maintaining the efficiency, scalability, and performance that we’ve established on the Joyent public cloud.