Scale Computing: As IoT Drives Digital Transformation, Partners Win

As IoT pushes the need for transformation, MSPs are benefiting from smaller form factors in the infrastructure space to address these new use cases, according to hyperconverged player Scale Computing.

MSPs are directly benefiting from vendors adapting to digital transformation, said Scott Mann, director of North American channel for Scale Computing.

"When you think digital transformation, you think of enterprises with use cases like smart cities and stores. You don't usually think of MSPs," Mann said to an audience of channel partners at The Channel Company's NexGen Cloud 2019 conference in Anaheim, Calif. on Wednesday.

But that's changing as vendors in the network infrastructure space work hand-in-hand with MSPs on brand-new use cases. IoT and edge computing, for example, are driving digital transformation and its infrastructure vendors rethink their form factors.

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Hyperconverged player Scale Computing is adapting to the changes that IoT is bringing. Today, Scale Computing offers "the smartphone for the infrastructure world," Mann said. Similar to how a smartphone combines functions, such as a calendar and contacts and puts it into a single platform, Scale Computing's offerings combine servers, storage, and virtualization into a single platform with backup and disaster recovery.

Ener Systems, a Covington, La.-based solution provider, helps businesses with a variety of services, including virtualization, backup, network security.

"From a scaling perspective, [Scale Computing's] products are nice and small compared to what we are used to dealing with, so I could see certain customers wanting to have something smaller, especially clients that are moving into new building and want the server room to be smaller," said Theresa Jones, cybersecurity practitioner for the firm.

MSPs, said Mann, can build a very profitable business around some of the new infrastructure solutions on the market today. That’s because partners can take advantage of the smaller form factors to offer new services, including IoT.

"These trends are directly affecting how [partners] can offer new solutions to customers," he said.

IoT is also pushing the need for computing outside of the four walls of the data center and to the edge, Mann said. "We're required to have the same capabilities at the edge, so the industry is thinking about changing its form factors and adjusting to prices that [customers] can afford -- it's putting a lot of pressure on manufacturers."

The industry is still demanding higher performance, but customers need a more compact offering because they don't often have data centers at their edge sites, Mann said.

Instead of deploying a single server, MSPs can now install a smaller system at the edge, while providing a layer of redundancy.

"You can offer them with enterprise-like capabilities at a price they can actually afford," Mann said. "The business model around this is substantially more profitable by leveraging new [infrastructure] technologies."