Edge company Acumera has today acquired Scale Computing, although the combined company will continue under the Scale Computing name. This doubles the size of the company and merges the existing offerings. Exactly how this will play out remains to be seen.
Now former Scale Computing CEO and co-founder Jeff Ready will become President and CMO, while Bill Morrow will remain in his current role as CEO of Acumera under its new name. Since we weren’t very familiar with Acumera ourselves, the new company immediately has significantly greater brand recognition from where we’re sitting. What will also remain the same (at least for now) is Scale Computing’s promise to remain loyal to its partners and customers. This was also reiterated by Ready, speaking with Techzine via email. “Even since Platform this year, we’ve seen Broadcom treat their partners and customers worse than ever — even reports of Broadcom taking business away from partners who originally brought in the customers and directing those customers to buy elsewhere.”
“We are taking a different approach. We are doubling our commitment with this combination.”
“Acumera is known primarily in the edge networking, managed security, and container-based edge computing for very large multi-site operators (gas stations, quick serve restaurants, convenience stores, etc),” Ready explains. “We at (the old) Scale Computing are, of course, known for virtualization, edge computing, and a wide horizontal customer set spanning industries from SMB to enterprise, with a channel-first go-to-market approach.” In other words: the two companies had a clearly overlapping but also distinct part of the market to target. Those markets will now be served by a single company.
According to Ready, Scale Computing, founded in 2007, needed to be able to respond to the latest trends in the IT industry, from AI to the Broadcom/VMware deal. The combined company should be able to grow faster than the two parties separately.
Seeing is believing
Scale Computing saw tremendous growth in its customer base after Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. This was explosive enough that Ready told us a year ago that it was initially hard to keep up with demand. Customers were mainly running away from Broadcom’s new pricing structure and strategy, which unabashedly targets the largest VMware customers. Organizations with smaller budgets have moved to alternatives. Nutanix is the most prominent of these (although still seen as pricey based on many queries from our side), but Scale Computing was also on the rise as a sleaker option. However, the latter’s unique character lay in the edge computing business, which is still considered a niche within the IT world, albeit a growing one. Put simply: not every company needing to run VMs also needs to run an edge deployment. Either way, Scale Computing’s dashboard is widely considered intuitive and for both use cases.
With the acquisition by Acumera, aided by investor Oaktree, the emphasis is likely to shift more toward the edge. This is simply the most likely case due to the heavy investment and level of expertise in all things edge, from network connectivity to tiny hardware. In that sense, the combination isn’t very strange at all, although customers may now be a little uncertain about the exact course the new company will take. Even with the same Scale Computing name continuing, it’s Acumera that is taking over Scale, not the other way around.
CMO Ready had this to say to round things off: “It’s a big move for us, for Acumera, and for our partners. But together, we are the new Scale Computing, and we are standing firm in our values, backed by some of the largest investors in the world, and we are betting that partners and customers will choose to work with the vendor who shows integrity, operates with accountability, and stands as a vigilant champion for them.”
Read also: Scale CEO: “Shocking” VMware saga offers an opportunity to approach IT differently