Yahoo Japan invests $6.1M in cloud provider

Yahoo Japan's subsidiary, IDC Frontier, has made a US$6.1 million strategic equity investment in Basho, a cloud and database technology company. It will also integrate Basho's technology into its cloud computing platform.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Basho said IDC Frontier, one of Japan's largest datacenter infrastructure operators, will introduce its Riak distributed database and cloud storage technology into its cloud computing environment as part of the partnership.
"Basho is excited to have IDC Frontier both as a customer and a strategic partner to accelerate our expansion throughout Asia," said Donald J. Rippert, CEO of Basho. "The market for cloud computing is rapidly accelerating. We are exclusively focused on being the distributed systems leader that can best unlock the potential of the cloud for our partners and our customers."

IDC Frontier's partnership with Basho will "greatly benefit from the addition of advanced storage capabilities within our cloud infrastructure", added Kiichi Yamato, vice-division director of business development at IDC Frontier.

Basho said IDC Frontier's investment follows an earlier additional US$5 million of equity capital raised by Georgetown Partners in June.

Yahoo Japan is a joint venture between Yahoo and Japan's Softbank. The news of IDC Frontier's investment comes after Yahoo's announcement that ex-Googler Marissa Mayer will be the new CEO of the U.S. technology giant.