Transcript
and Customer Summit. The company is continuing to reiterate its value over its competitor, VMware. Broadcom's acquisition has caused a huge shakeup in the channel, beginning with the termination of more than 15,000 partner contracts. Scale Computing has welcomed these partners with several incentives. Here's Scott Mann with more. Well, Scott, thanks for your time today. Let's first talk about the markets that Scale Computing is seeing the most success in. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't give it to an individual market if you look at the macro economy right now and what would be affecting the IT infrastructure world, call out the elephant in the room. There was a massive acquisition, Broadcom acquiring VMware, that's affected a ton of partners out there, right? They're going to focus on 600 of their customers that generate 70% of the revenue, 70% plus. They have around 300,000 customers, 600 of 300,000, that's like a fraction of a percent. So there's every customer out there of all shapes and sizes doing many different things from data-centered edge, public hosting, private hosting, all of that that are being impacted by this pricing. Those market trends are definitely driving a big change in how people are consuming data in the IT infrastructure space today. And how would you say Scale is then evolving itself to meet the needs of those partners? The irony is that we're not really necessarily evolving ourselves today because we've been evolving ourselves over the last 12 years. We've built the products, we've built all the sales tools and everything. So for our partners, we know what the market is that's out there and we know how we can play in that market, what use cases we can do well in that market. So now it's really just about us getting on top of the mountain and screaming as loud as we can that there's another solution out there and it's not just a VMware alternative. It's the opportunity to look at a solution that was innovated at the peak of the current data-centered trends that did it a little bit better, that innovated on that current solution and figure out how can I take my offering into the modern era of computing outside of what we've all become accustomed to over the last two decades. And what kind of success would you say that you're seeing with your global partner base right now? If you look at over the next three years, there's going to be a lot of change happening, but it's been pretty current. So where's the most success happening right now is the people that I think have been impacted by it the most. And you look at the people that have pricing from VMware that was like strategic pricing, like public sector, education, nonprofit, that they're kind of on a level now of price parity across the private sector now. So their prices are going up from anywhere from like 3 to 9x. And the other side of it is, you know, any MSPs that are hosting, putting together, they have a hosting practice that's based off of VMware. They didn't make the cut and they're having to buy secondhand. Their prices are dramatically increasing and their pricing model, their whole business structure that they built has just been upended, right? So they need to find a solution in the short term to fix that and something that can help them innovate in the future. Well, you mentioned the future. What trends is scale computing investing in looking ahead to? The private cloud. I think there's going to be a lot of changes happening in that private cloud space because people aren't going to go buy secondhand and increase their costs. In the short term, people are going to look at mitigating the losses that they have. I talked to a lot of hosting partners that they're losing money every day. They're burning through cash because of these price increases. We're going to see the private cloud moving outside of your traditional four walls of the data center. And obviously, the other big trend in the market is like AI. And I think we're going to see companies that are trying to innovate and be able to use a platform like scale computing to replace that data center use case and extend that beyond the data center, find new revenue streams, new areas that they can focus on, like on the OT side of the house where AI is predominantly being used in because that's now an IT use case that they can branch out into. So there's going to be a lot of adoption of new use cases for data protection for your customers out there. Great. Well, thank you so much. My pleasure. And for more coverage here from Platform 2024, be sure to follow along with CRN TV and check out the link on this screen for more information on Scale Computing's partner incentives.
