Intel’s announcement last month that it would no longer produce the Next Unit of Computing (NUC), the backbone of edge server environments and one of the best-selling computers in the world, didn’t square with Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready.
“I’m like what? We sell thousands of these things,” he told CRN. “They’re getting out of the manufacturing part of that business. They already have other partners. You could be an Intel-authorized manufacturer and make them. Which is how most of Intel’s business works. The NUC was its own sort of thing. Early on, no one was making these tiny PCs.”
[RELATED: Intel May License NUC Mini PC Designs To Other Firms, No Plans For Now]
Ready, who co-founded and runs Scale Computing, an Indianapolis-based VMware competitor that specializes in edge environments, said the NUC was an odd line of business for the company. But Ready said it’s been a great opportunity to remind customers that with Scale as a foundation they can always change hardware to match business needs.
“Even if the NUCs were going away, the fact is three years from now that generation of NUC or Dell server, or Lenovo server are totally different, and may not be backward compatible,” he said. “With Scale, it doesn’t matter. You can run a 10-year-old server next to the old one. If you have GPU needs all of a sudden, you just drop it in there.”
Another market factor driving business is VMware’s merger with Broadcom, which has been churning through regulators for more than a year and mired in a second-request FTC investigation since July 11, 2022.
The $61 billion deal has won approval from regulators in the European Union, the UK, Canada, South Africa, and Brazil, but is still awaiting approval from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Ready calls that, “All good news. It’s one of the top three things we have going on in terms of lead generation.”
He talked with CRN about the merger, Intel’s announcement, and how Scale Computing is preparing its customers and partners for generative AI at the edge.
LEARN MORE: Scale Computing | Generative AI | Artificial Intelligence | CPUs-GPUs | AI
O’Ryan Johnson is a veteran news reporter. He covers the data center beat for CRN and hopes to hear from channel partners about how he can improve his coverage and write the stories they want to read. He can be reached at [email protected]..
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