Scale Computing owes much of its rapid growth to Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and its accompanying flight of customers. However, there is more to this company than meets the eye, both now and in the future. CEO Jeff Ready warns potential customers against focusing too much on the present at the expense of future IT needs. We learned this and more during the annual Scale Computing Platform in Las Vegas.
Scale Computing’s t
Scale Computing’s executives are keenly aware of where their solution excels and where it may fall short. Since its founding in 2007, the focus has been on distributed computing power, minimizing downtime and, above all else, simplicity in management. A dashboard provides access to cluster deployments with a single click, whether they are close to home or in a remote edge location.
That’s the upside, but the other side of the simplicity coin is a lack of fine-grained control. You can’t deliver both capabilities at the same time, Scale Computing co-founder and CEO Jeff Ready acknowledges. Call it the iPhone model, as Ready, his colleagues, and Reddit commenters have done as it relates to how Scale operates. Buy an Android if you want to tinker, in other words. Or, if your organization is large enough and your requirements are very specific, opt for Nutanix or another VMware alternative, or accept the higher costs under Broadcom to leverage your existing expertise in that domain.
The shock is over
When Ready called the VMware by Broadcom saga “shocking” in conversation with Techzine in 2024, he was referring in particular to the treatment of partners and the sudden loss of communication with customers. We don’t need to dwell on the details here (see previous reports for that), but it’s clear that Scale Computing’s explosive growth (+45 percent in 2024) could not have happened without Broadcom’s market disruption.
The same could be said for Nutanix, but just like last year, its CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told us last week that the influx of former VMware customers is gradual and will likely continue to be so. This is less surprising than it seems. This is because Nutanix is targeting larger enterprise customers, as it confirms itself and as Scale’s people also mention. The battleground between VMware and Nutanix is likely to be among customers who are barely able or unable to absorb the increased costs under Broadcom. Meanwhile, Scale repeatedly encounters Nutanix as a rival in customer discussions, but the focus is clearly more on SMEs and smaller deployments for the former. Put simply, Scale can go smaller than its rivals. Ready does note that his company would be happy to take on an organization such as a large airline as a customer for virtualization, even though that is not playing to the strengths of the Scale platform necessarily.
Edge and simplicity
A common complaint about Scale Computing is that the platform offers too little control for some. As mentioned, this is by design: if problems arise, the (well-received) support number is ready to help. This applies to VM migrations, deployment, edge environments, and even if your hardware stems from a different, earlier deal. Where Scale previously focused on its own HCI appliance, it now works without fault with plenty of servers from Dell, Lenovo, HPE, and more. It’s all x86, but we are assured that an infrastructure solution such as Scale won’t “just work” unless the peculiarities of each server are accounted for. That engineering must remain invisible to the customer in the end – they’ll only notice if things don’t work as they should. This extra support marks the transition to a bigger focus on software at Scale, which is necessary because the huge influx of new customers is not willing to simply throw away relatively young hardware.
Chief Product Officer Scott Loughmiller also emphasized ease of use during his keynote speech at Platform 2025. The goal is to make the edge (roughly speaking: computing power that is not in a data center, be it on-premises, colocation, or cloud) as easy to manage as the public cloud. Zero-touch provisioning was introduced in Q4 last year for this purpose, while applications will also be deployable in clusters later this year. This is facilitated by the new collaboration with Veeam in the form of a plug-in for Scale Computing’s operating system, HyperCore. In addition to an existing Ansible collection, there is now also a Terraform integration for tasks such as importing media, applications, and modifying IP addresses. In other words, the complexity that customers demand can at times be found in the tooling they may already be using or want to use.
Other ease-of-use features also received considerable applause, such as Console Paste, which allows passwords and encryption keys to be cut and pasted between VMs, better metrics for said VMs, and the ability to leverage GPU clusters. The latter is clearly a phenomenon that, as is the case with IT infrastructure within organizations, is being bolted onto Scale’s existing offering. Starting in Q3, organizations will be able to add additional nodes with GPU capacity to their existing clusters, because “GPUs are no longer a niche,” as Loughmiller notes.
Born in the edge
This makes it clearer how Scale is responding to the new group of potential customers. However, there is a longer-term story to be told, far beyond the vicissitudes surrounding Broadcom (or “Badcom,” as it is snidely referred to in a slide during the keynote). Scale certainly has no lack of ambition in this regard. According to the company, the IT industry is entering a new paradigm of distributed computing this decade. In an alternating current of centralization-distribution-centralization-distribution, we can spot a list of IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and… Scale Computing. That’s some company to keep. However modest Scale may be about the exact use case of their own software, it clearly does see itself as a trailblazer in a world where edge is set to dominate. We’ll have to wait and see on that; it’s not wrong to believe in a vision, at any rate.
There are some who believe there aren’t enough edge apps needed to make its deployment a priority. Ready argues that it is a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” or a chicken-and-egg story if you will. If you don’t build edge apps, there will be no apps for the edge to run, and if you don’t run them, there’s no proof that they’re worth running in the first place. There are still plenty of useful examples of said apps, with Scale citing retailers who use computer vision to detect cases of theft via cameras. If the development and rollout of such an application goes smoothly, an AI-democratized development wave could emerge, resulting in dozens of new apps for the edge. Edge apps will be born and nurtured inside these environments, just as cloud-native solutions grew up in the public cloud. Again, this is a very positive interpretation of the future. There is sound logic behind it, to be fair.
“Project Kraken” is the name of the Scale initiative to drive this process of edge simplification. The aforementioned deployment of applications is crucial here. Other projects may follow to make the platform more flexible for all kinds of use cases. Nutanix is thinking along the same lines, with the previously discussed “Project Beacon,” which has resulted in a Cloud Native AOS that does not require a hypervisor, previously a critical component for running Nutanix.
Conclusion: Scale knows what it is
As mentioned, Scale Computing’s growth rates are enormous. Compare Scale’s 45 percent with Nutanix, which was up 15 percent, and you might think that one party is benefiting much more from the VMware exodus than the other. However, this is more a question of orientation: new Scale customers who have fled VMware sometimes have only 3 or 4 VMs. Proxmox could also have been chosen as a lightweight option, but Scale is a much more business-oriented option here. Meanwhile, Nutanix is targeting companies with hundreds, thousands or more VMs, which is a completely different story. In addition, Scale Computing’s presence is relatively small still by most accounts, especially outside North America, so it is easier to achieve sky-high growth figures. Nevertheless, that growth is there, and it should impress anyone.
This growth comes as no surprise to Ready. When he drew up the business model for Scale in 2007 (on a piece of paper, as one does), he already assumed that Scale would eventually become a VMware competitor or replacement. He accepts that a forced exit strategy among customers was necessary to achieve this current growth spurt. Nevertheless, it merely has accelerated the adoption that Ready had already predicted to arrive.
What is striking about Scale Computing is that its offering categorically requires few frills, only plugins and functions that add to the simplicity play. Where Nutanix can dream of features comparable to VMware, Scale can only be fully utilized if you embrace its slender cohesion. Customers and MSPs should keep this in mind when considering Scale deployments.
Sometimes VMware customers leave purely out of spite, according to Ready. People often work more on intuition and feeling than on an overly rational view, even within the IT world, as was repeatedly emphasized during Scale Computing’s Platform 2025 event. It is therefore particularly important to consider where your organization’s needs will be in five to ten years’ time, as Scale may be the best option for edge deployment or, alternatively, may be too much of a black box for some. These abstractions are deliberate and suit the SMEs that are running furthest away from Broadcom’s new VMware proposition. That, again, makes for a bright future for the company.
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