Scale Computing CEO: The Future Of IT Infrastructure Is Edge Computing

The vendor’s new Kraken release is ‘helping developers write apps faster, having people who don’t normally or could never have written an app contribute to applications. And that causes an explosion in the number of apps. And so as the number of apps goes up, there’s more applications which can and will run at the edge economically in a way that makes sense,’ says Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready.

While Scale Computing’s Platform//2025 conference this week was focused on how the hyperconverged infrastructure technology developer is expanding its drive to be a dominating force in the edge computing market, the company subtly and not so subtly also used the gathering to take advantage of the disruptions caused by Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware.

Scale Computing, like rival Nutanix, competed against VMware for the hyperconverged infrastructure market, which is focused on developing edge computing and private cloud deployments. VMware, before it was acquired by Broadcom, had by far the largest share of that market. However, that market leadership has been shaken since the acquisition as Broadcom changed licensing terms, raised prices and cut channel partner access to VMware’s technology.

Scale Computing, in a bid to grab a lion’s share of the SMB market the company said Broadcom has all but abandoned, brought up what it called the concerns of channel partners about VMware.

Broadcom declined to respond to a request for more information from CRN.

A Scale Computing executive even went so far as to refer to Broadcom as “Badcom.”

Mitch Etchason, senior product manager at Scale Computing, took to the stage pretending to be a midsize retail customer who had just switched from VMware to Scale Computing and listing issues that seemed to resonate with the audience of solution providers and end-user customers.

“We are a longtime user of the now ‘Badcom’ hypervisor,” Etchason said in a slight to Broadcom. “And as soon as that acquisition went down, we noticed very quickly things like support knowledge-based articles were getting lost in the shuffle as they were changing from the previous company’s support portal to Badcom’s support portal. In addition, just getting support techs on the phone was increasingly hard, so our support experience was going downhill pretty fast. Of course, all of this was happening against the backdrop of renewals coming up, and it was really hard to even just get the quotes to know how much we needed to pay for the renewals. And unfortunately, when we finally did get our hands on those quotes, they were much higher than we expected or have ever seen in the past.”

Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready, during his keynote presentation, said the IT industry moved from centralized mainframe computing to distributed client/server architectures back to centralization with data centers and the cloud and is now again moving toward distributed computing with edge computing.

“And the signs that this is happening and that this is a change of an era are all around us, not least of which is what’s happened with our friends over at VMware,” Ready said. “VMware was obviously the dominant operating system of that data center era, and then Broadcom bought them.”

Broadcom was not the right company to grow VMware, Ready said.

“What we do know about Broadcom, not specific to VMware, just in general, is that they like to acquire software companies which, in their own words, are mature companies with mature products and mature markets,” he said. “Now, ‘mature markets’ is financial doublespeak for a market which has already peaked and is declining. And that’s the key. If they believe that the market has peaked and declining, they’re going to operate the business in a certain way.”

That way, he said, is a process that private equity firms refer to as profit harvesting.

“Doesn’t that sound fun?” he said. “Profit harvesting. And the kinds of things they do again because they think it’s a declining market is they cut R&D expenses because why would you invest into a declining market? They cut their investment in the channel and cut out channel partners. Some of you guys have felt this. Why would they invest in the channel if they believe it’s a declining market? They raise prices. They drop products which are not that profitable. They focus only on their largest and stickiest and most profitable customers. Now, it doesn’t feel great. It’s not the way that I would want to run a business. However, if you put yourself in their shoes and believe that the market is declining, you can see why they might do this.”

Instead, Ready said, the future of IT infrastructures is edge computing. He said there are three common misconceptions about the edge, the first of which is the idea that the edge is just another name for on-prem.

While edge infrastructure by default is on-prem, that wildly undersells what the edge is really all about, he said. Instead, the edge is now a place where applications can be managed, especially with Scale Computing’s HyperCore version 10 release, code-named “Kraken,” he said.

“What we have in Kraken is the introduction of application management,” he said. “In other words, the same ease of use, the same ease of deployment that you’ve come to know about Scale in terms of deploying infrastructure, we are now bringing to actual application and application management. Said differently, you can now effortlessly deploy applications to one, some or all of your sites without ever leaving Fleet Manager with the click of one button. And this is just one of many features which are going in this direction on our road map of application management.”

The second misconception is the idea that everything can be run in the cloud. Indeed, Ready said, there are a lot of workloads that are not suitable for the cloud, particularly AI applications that would run on a GPU-enabled PC at relatively low up-front cost vs. on the cloud for several tens of thousands of dollars per year.

The third and the final misconception, and the one Ready said is by far the most important one, is the idea that there aren’t that many apps that run at the edge. Businesses such as retailers are already running their businesses using apps running on the edge with devices in their individual stores and are able to do BIOS upgrades and security patches from a centralized location rather than individually for each store, he said.

Indeed, Ready said, Scale Computing’s new Kraken release now not only allows apps to be easily deployed on the edge in seconds, which in turn encourages AI-assisted application development to move to the edge.

“[That’s helping] developers write apps faster, having people who don’t normally or could never have written an app contribute to applications,” he said. “And that causes an explosion in the number of apps. And so as the number of apps goes up, there’s more applications which can and will run at the edge economically in a way that makes sense.”

Ready’s comments about customers moving to the edge and the misconceptions many have about the edge caught the ear of Frank Arnett, director of MSP and strategic sales at Otava, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based cloud services provider and Scale Computing channel partner

“I agree with his whole thought process,” Arnett told CRN. “But I think what we’re starting to see is people are going to evolve that thought process. We work with MSPs that may, for instance, have a niche in manufacturing and are starting to see the manufacturing industry starting to move toward a focus on IoT devices, real-time data on the production lines. So many opportunities to cut costs there and build efficiency. But all of that has to live at the edge. But instead of looking at it from just the edge sense, look more from a hybrid cloud sense. With the edge being tied into multiple pieces to make more of a cohesive type of environment, I think the edge play is going to evolve over the next four or five years with quantum computing and a lot of what you see coming down the pipe.”

As for calling Broadcom “Badcom,” Ben Stiles, Otava’s digital transformation and solutions executive, told CRN that given that Scale Computing and VMware are direct competitors, he understands the reason for the name-calling.

“It's nice to lean into the market feelings and kind of that overall trend,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that don’t feel like they were handled as appreciated customers within that ecosystem, and kind of got ushered out of it. So there is definitely that sentiment.”

However, Stiles said, Otava is still very much in the Broadcom portfolio.

“So it’s more of a diversification play for us,” he said. “And so a lot of that’s being able to give customers choice. You know, the ability to lean in when the customer says, ‘Hey, I have an affinity towards this,’ or, ‘Hey, I don’t want to be in this ecosystem for a particular reason.’”