What’s a big new investment Scale is doing to drive net-new edge computing sales?

We’ve made some announcements in the video surveillance and security space. We found that digital video, which generally means surveillance, is one of the primary edge use cases. There’s lots of edge computing use cases, but it’s one where even a small type of customer typically is doing something with video. We see surveillance is sort of universal, but we see digital video in manufacturing starting to be widely deployed where they’re using analytics tools to look at parts coming down the line and inspecting it for flaws, or different things that mechanical engineers do like collecting data, processing data, making decisions on that data, literally, right on the factory floor. They might be using AI and different things, but us providing that platform has been good.

We’ve seen some good traction with video, but some of the interesting things -- especially in regards to the channel is – you’ve got this convergence of traditional video integrators. So, people that would come into a customer to do security cameras, building controls, and key FOBs, and all this kind of stuff, which is not IT.

Yet they’re putting in a video surveillance system, so there’s software applications that are collecting data, there’s different applications that are processing that data and they may have three or four different apps running on a server just to do video. Then building controls is another server and the thing that runs the gate at the plant is another server. So they find themselves needing something like hyper-converged infrastructure at the edge.

We’re seeing this interesting kind of crossover in the channel where traditional IT vendors are now moving into video systems, and traditional video vendors are moving into IT systems. We’re basically setting them up with a platform that can start on either end, or both at the same time, and kind of merge into the other.