Scale Computing’s Jeff Ready: ‘I Am In This For The Long Haul’

‘What I do love are partners and customers. And so I put myself in a position that not only am I going to be here for a long time, but I’m that guy. So if anything, [partners] will see more of me than they had before,’ Scale Computing President and CMO Jeff Ready tells CRN about his role after last week’s news that the company is merging with Acumera.

Scale Computing grew sales 45 percent last year, but its co-founder—and new President and CMO Jeff Ready—said the company could have done more.

“As silly as it may seem to say this because those are huge growth numbers, but we could have grown faster,” he said. “And now we’re in position where we will because we’ve got those resources.”

To attain those resources, for the last year Ready has worked to bring Indianapolis-based Scale together with Austin, Texas-based Acumera, another edge-based company that has security and networking products that complement Scale’s virtualization and hyperconverged infrastructure. The merger with Acumera—with backing from private equity powerhouse Oak Tree Capital—was announced last week.

“We are now a much broader product portfolio company,” Ready said. “Partners who like working with one vendor in multiple areas, which many of them do, we now do that—it’s not just a one-trick pony. So lots of opportunities, I think, for the channel, lots of expertise that we can bring in deals large and small.”

[RELATED: Acumera Buys Scale Computing, Targets Broadcom-VMware]

Under the terms of the merger, Acumera CEO Bill Morrow will become the CEO of the new combined enterprise, which is named Scale Computing. Scale Computing co-founder Scott Loughmiller will be chief product officer.

Since May 2022, when Broadcom announced its intention to buy VMware—a deal the company closed in November 2023—Ready has been focused on taking share from the trillion-dollar chipmaker by seizing on its channel history and its stumbles with reseller partners out of the gate.

Scale has capitalized on the disruption as VMware’s channel was squeezed by Broadcom’s tactics, which have included eliminating the partner program without warning, followed by the introduction of an invitation-only program. That move shed thousands of smaller VMware partners, reducing the total partner count from about 25,000 in 2023 to around 18,000 in 2024.

Broadcom declined to comment when reached by CRN.

“Whatever Broadcom does, I’m pretty much going to do the opposite,” Ready told CRN regarding Scale’s channel strategy. “A lot of people have taken a look at Scale Computing in the past and perhaps hesitated because of perceived size or risk that we would just go away, and this should give them the assurance that no, not only are we not going away, but we’re doubling down.”

To that end, Ready says he has no plans to depart Scale, and senior leadership including Loughmiller and Scott Mann—repeat CRN Channel Madness champion and managing director and vice president of Scale Computing International, remain committed to the mission.

“We are a very high-growth company. We’re profitable; we’re debt-free,” Ready said. “We are very well positioned to give our partners and customers a lot of reassurance that we’re here for the long haul.”

Here is more of the conversation between Ready and CRN.

How big is this merger, and how much do you see this growing Scale in terms of the market?

The company has more than doubled in size. That’s from a personnel standpoint. That’s from a revenue standpoint. That’s from a customer standpoint. That’s just sort of across the board, with multiple product lines coming together.

I mentioned that a question that I get on a literally daily basis is some version of, ‘Is Scale big enough? Are they going to go away? Is Broadcom just going to buy them next?’

I would explain that’s not our strategy. Our strategy is to be here for the long haul. But this action is making that point. This is building the new Scale.

I’ve been building Scale for a long time, and I love building it. But I can see that there’s just so much opportunity and so much ongoing—I don’t know—destruction?

I had partners telling me, yes, Broadcom has sent their customers emails saying to go get your renewal somewhere else without even talking to the partner about it.

It is the craziest thing I’d ever, ever heard. So it’s like, OK, speed matters here. And so I’ve been working on this for almost a year to try and pull this off and have this combined company, and then, effectively, the new Scale Computing.

Of course, old Scale had exciting enterprise customers. The new Scale, coming from the Acumera side, has a lot more because that was their area of focus. And to be able to say to a classic Scale partner and a classic Scale customer that, yes, one of the references is [Acumera customer] Taco Bell, is helpful. It’s helpful to go get the next Taco Bell. It’s also helpful to get the guy who just likes Taco Bell.

On the Acumera side of it, that company dovetails with what you folks do. You’re both edge companies. You both have a big presence in retail and several other midmarket verticals. Can you just talk about, for lack of a better word, I guess, the ‘synergies’ there?

So you definitely hit it. I mean, this creates the definitive edge company. So their strength has been edge, networking, security, managed services at the edge, container-based edge platforms and these very large multisite primarily retailers.

Now, combine that with Scale’s strength of virtualization, or ‘revirtualization,’ as Gartner is now calling it, scalable clusters, the storage technology. So you peel it back—what makes up IT infrastructure? It’s networking, security, compute and storage. That’s it. And this company now has all of that, with a specialization in the edge. But of course, applicability across the traditional data center, like we always have, but now to fill the needs for customers across that is important.

I mean, you think about my comment about filling the void to become the next VMware. Well, VMware had networking technology. They had security technology, etc. They didn’t start with it all. But why did they end up there? Because that’s what the customers and the partners wanted them to become.

We’re just going to step in. We're going to add these things, and it is very powerful. I mean, it is literally one vendor who a partner can work with and say, ‘Do you have a retail customer? Do you have a customer that looks like retail?’

There’s a lot of stuff that looks like retail in the edge that isn’t necessarily retail. When you think about health care and hospitals, we have hospitals and doctor’s offices and labs and all those kinds of things, but you don’t think of that as edge computing, but it is.

We do a lot in transportation and oil and gas, etc.

I’ve already had a lot of partners and customers coming to me today asking, ‘Hey, when can we get our hands on some of this networking and security?’ They’re excited to dive right in.

And why? It’s not because they didn’t have firewalls. Firewalls have 100 percent market penetration. But there’s that trusted relationship. For a partner, these are two different ways to enter the same account. That account needs a firewall. You can start there. That account wants to talk edge. You can start there and then combine those two things together.

I want to ask about R&D and AI. What can partners and customers expect on that front in terms of innovation and leaning into AI use cases at the edge?

I would say first off, the rise of AI at the edge has become probably the No. 1 driver of edge deployments. Customers who are looking to do computer vision or large language models or any of the different types of AI that we see, the inference side of that, they want to run it close to wherever that source of data is.

As you’ve heard me talk about, it’s wildly less expensive to do that stuff at the edge than to transfer all that data into the cloud and run the cloud and bring it back again. So now when I talk about doubling the size of the company, we’ve doubled the size of the R&D team. Now we can start combining things.

So you can imagine that when we looked at this, there were things on the Acumera side, they had things on their product road map that we already had and vice versa. They had things they were going to work on that we were also going to work on. And so now you streamline all that.

All of a sudden, you’re like, ‘Hey, we have extra capacity.’ And you can start diving in. And so rapidly being able to deploy containerized or virtualized AI applications at the edge, that’s what the combined platform is really all about. Not every application is AI, but a lot of them are. A lot of them are going to be. So that’s what we’re looking to enable.

Again, from the partner standpoint, from the channel standpoint, it’s one more very interesting conversation they can have with a customer, prospect, an existing customer, at a time when that prospect is thinking only negative thoughts because of Broadcom.

So, yes, we can help you with that, right? And if all they want to do is swap, if all they want is the revirtualization part, that’s fine. But hey, let’s talk about AI, let’s talk about edge. Let’s talk about, ‘What if we can combine and simplify your security infrastructure with your compute infrastructure and move into the future?”

Jeff, can you talk about the professional services that are coming? This is new for Scale, is it not?

If you want to provide managed services or need someone else to provide managed services, we’ve been very limited previously in our ability to provide what’s generically called professional services because we’ve been primarily a product company. We would get asked all the time, ‘Can you guys do this?’

Some partners do those co-services themselves, and some don’t, and some are somewhere in between. That’s a capability that we just never had and, depending on the customer, some customers want to manage everything themselves. That’s great. Some customers want other people to manage it. So we can enable either one.

There’s more sort of wallet share for those partners, more margin for them and it can match their own desires and capabilities. Again, as you know, some partners are super technical, and providing those services is what they do. Other partners are much less technical, but they know the vendors. They know the products, and they have those relationships, and so they want the vendors to provide some of that.

We can work it either way.

On the partner front, a lot of partners, they’ve had sort of mixed dealings with private equity or products that have been bought by private equity. What are you giving them in terms of reassurance?

First and foremost, I suppose, when you look at the name of the company, that’s not a coincidence. Acumera is a company that’s been around for 20 years, just like Scale.

So why was the go-forward name Scale? It’s because we recognize the brand value and sensitivity of the channel. What’s the message we’re going to send right after this transaction closes? We wanted that message to be, ‘We’re still a dedicated channel-first company, just like we’ve always been.’

When the partners—and this has been happening all day—as the partners engage with us, they’re engaging with the same people they’ve always engaged with. So that didn’t change.

That’s why this is not a ‘Broadcom buys VMware.’ This is very much going to feel like, ‘Hey, you call tech support, you’re getting the same people you got before. You want to talk to your channel rep, it’s the same channel rep that you had before. You want to talk to Jeff, Jeff’s here just like before.’

You are a co-founder, so your presence, that’s a reassuring sign to anybody that does business with Scale. What can you tell me about your plans to stay at Scale and to continue to work there?

I am in this for the long haul. This is one of the discussions you have in a combination like this, which is OK, what role is it going to be going forward? I very specifically took advantage of the opportunity, I would say, to position myself so I could be more in front of customers and partners, which is where I love to be.

I don’t like talking to lawyers all the time. It’s not my thing. I don’t like some of the back-end stuff that drives the business. And I love my investors, but hanging out at board meetings isn’t my favorite thing.

But what I do love are partners and customers. And so I put myself in a position that not only am I going to be here for a long time, but I’m that guy. So if anything, they’ll see more of me than they had before.

In fact, right before I talked to you, I was on a call with Scott Mann. Scott was saying, ‘The partners are so excited that they’re going to see you more.’

Because before it was like, yes, I would do road shows and stuff. But now it’s much more front and center so I fully expect to still be right out there in the front, poking away at things in the industry that I think are stupid.

Is the channel going to change much? What’s the channel going to look like under this new structure with these new business partners that you have here?

The channel honestly won’t see much, if any, change at all. In fact, the chief revenue officer of the combined company comes from the Scale side. The chief product officer, for that matter, of the combined company is my co-founder, Scott [Loughmiller], who was the chief product officer for us. So, to the channel partners who were existing Scale Computing channel partners, it’s going to feel very much the same in that regard.

What will be different is there’s going to be new products. They’re going to be able to sell new services as we roll out some of these combined technologies, as we bring the expertise in some of these vertical markets that Acumera is so strong in.

If somebody gets wind of a fast-food restaurant that might be interested in the business, well, they’ve got vertical experts there. That’s not something that we’ve had ourselves in the past. We’ve been very horizontal kind of generalists. So having those sales resources and marketing resources to help the channel in those industries, that’s going to be a welcome addition.

But on the daily [business] whether they talked to Scale last week or today or next week or a month from now, it’s probably the same people doing the same stuff.