Channel Stalwart Scott Mann Ready To Provide Antidote To VMware Licensing, Hardware Price Hikes As New StorMagic SVP Global Sales

New StorMagic Global Senior Vice President Scott Mann says with soaring VMware licensing renewals and rising hardware prices, the time is right for partners to add StorMagic to their edge virtualization portfolio.

Scott Mann, the driving force behind the successful buildout of the formidable Scale Computing virtualization channel, is ready to help partners battle sharp increases in VMware renewals and rising hardware costs as the new global senior vice president of sales for virtualization up-and-comer StorMagic.

With VMware renewals coming in at price increases of as much as 400 percent and hardware prices soaring in the wake of rising memory prices, the “time is right” for partners to look at adding StorMagic to their edge virtualization portfolio, said Mann, the former managing director and vice president of Scale Computing International.

“Partners are looking for a solution that meets the intersection of those two dilemmas (soaring VMware renewal licensing costs and rising hardware prices),” he said. “That is exactly what StorMagic addresses. It is more agnostic than anything on the market. It is hypervisor agnostic and you can run it on whatever hardware you want to run it on.”

StorMagic announced Mann’s appointment on Tuesday, singling out his appointment as a sign of the company’s “priority on accelerating global revenue growth by scaling its channel-first go-to-market strategy and deepening customer adoption across key edge computing markets.”

Many customers are anxious to get off VMware but are “tied down because hardware prices have skyrocketed and they don’t have budget for hardware refreshes,” said Mann, who successfully battled VMware at Scale, driving astronomical channel sales growth over 11 years. “With StorMagic you can take the software and just replace VMware. It preserves the lifespan of the hardware that customers already have.”

Mann (pictured above) said he sees many cases where StorMagic can come to the rescue with pricing that is one-fourth or one-third the cost of the VMware renewal.

CRN reached out to Broadcom VMware, which declined to comment.

Besides the price increases, the StorMagic edge virtualization solution lets customers use their existing hardware, avoiding the soaring memory costs that are wreaking havoc on IT budgets, said Mann.

Mann said most VMware alternatives require customers to get new hardware or retrofit existing hardware. “That’s going to be expensive,” he said. “I haven’t seen a solution on the market that is as flexible from a hardware perspective as StorMagic.”

In fact, Mann said, over the past four months he has seen hardware prices rise by 60 to 80 percent.

“With StorMagic, you can keep your existing hardware and get the full lifecycle you want out of your current hardware. You can run that hardware for another year or two years,” he said.

TJ Houske, president and general manager, public cloud for Opti9, a hybrid cloud solution provider, said the hiring of Mann is a big plus for StorMagic.

“Scott is a really great leader,” said Houske, who worked closely with Mann during his tenure as CEO of Otava, a Scale Computing partner. “What he did at Scale I imagine he will duplicate at StorMagic but faster because you always do it better the second time.”

Houske said he would definitely be interested in exploring partnership opportunities with StorMagic now that Mann is there.

“It’s all about relationships,” he said. “Scott is one of those rare people that does what he says he is going to do and he does it with excellence. What you see is what you get with Scott. He is rooted in leadership, humble, very smart, and a really hard worker. I don’t think you can ask for anything more when you are staffing a leadership position.”

Houske said Mann’s proven channel experience makes him a big addition to StorMagic. “It’s going to be fun to see what happens with StorMagic over the next two to three years in terms of their growth,” he said.

Mann said a big reason for his move to StorMagic was the company’s no-holds-barred, channel-first commitment.

In fact, he said, StorMagic CEO Susan Odle’s channel commitment was a key reason for his joining the company. He said Odle, who was named “Best Channel Visionary of the Year, Vendor/Distributor” in CRN’s Best of Channel Awards last year, is a channel-first leader. “I’m excited to follow her channel-first leadership,” said Mann.

Odle, for her part, in the press release announcing Mann’s appointment singled out Mann’s “strong track record of scaling partner ecosystems and driving growth, making him a tremendous addition to the StorMagic team."

Mann said he was approached by StorMagic and feels fortunate to have taken the call and made the move. “That is one of those conversations that I will look back on and think how lucky I was to have said yes to taking the call,” he said. “I am very thankful.”