Jeff Ready, the hard-driving co-founder and CEO of midmarket virtualization stalwart Scale Computing, says Broadcom-VMware changes have propelled his company into the enterprise market, leading to a whopping 400 percent increase in enterprise sales in 2024.
“At this point 50 percent of our pipeline is enterprise and 50 percent is midmarket,” said Ready in an interview at CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange 2025 conference. “That’s a wild shift from where it was 18 months ago. At that point it was probably 10 percent enterprise and 90 percent midmarket. It’s a huge, huge shift.”
Ready said he expects the enterprise momentum to continue in 2025 with an anticipated 100 percent growth in that segment of the business. “We expect to add 1,000-plus partners and probably 1,000-plus new customers [in 2025],” he said. “We are also seeing quite a bit of global expansion.”
[WATCH: Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready On Edge Computing And AI]
Ready said the changes after Broadcom acquired VMware in November 2023, including a dramatic increase in prices based on a new Broadcom-VMWare per-core subscription model, partner terminations and Broadcom-VMware’s decision to take the top 2,000 accounts direct, have been a “catalyst” for the big gains Scale Computing is making in the enterprise market.
In fact, Ready said the VMware changes have enterprise CIOs and partners rethinking their commitment to the VMware architecture. “There is no trust,” he said. “How can you run a business if your main vendor partner is thrashing things around like this? At the end of the day no matter where this settles down—if it ever does settle down—there is a broken trust between the vendor and the customer and between the vendor and the partners.”
Broadcom-VMware declined to comment on Ready’s comments.
Scale Computing has put on a full-court press to recruit VMware partners and attract VMware customers. The company has implemented a “VMware Rip & Replace Offer” providing a 25 percent software and services discount for VMware customers. In addition, it is offering a full system exchange trade-up plus no-cost coverage for the remaining VMware term with its “Seamless Switch: Trade Up To Scale Computing” promotion.
As part of its enterprise march, Scale has dramatically increased its R&D investment to add enterprise features to its product set. In midyear, Scale is adding a new Fleet Manager capability that supports application delivery. “It underscores just how different the future I am describing is from what you see happening at Broadcom,” said Ready.
One sign of Scale Computing’s ascent in the wake of the Broadcom-VMware changes is the growth of Scale Computing’s Platform partner conference scheduled for May 13 to 15 at Resorts World in Las Vegas.
This year, Ready said, Scale Computing will host 1,000 attendees, up from only 300 attendees two years ago. “We expect it to be a sell-out,” he said. “We have an expanding ecosystem including backup vendors and security vendors. The same pressure that customers feel about Broadcom-VMware is what partners feel about Broadcom-VMware. It is also what other vendors feel. Other vendors who for a long time had their product working on VMware find they now need to shift gears, so we have become a natural place for them to partner.”