Scale Computing looks to increase UK partner base fourfold
Hyper-converged vendor launches new partner programme in UK
Scale Computing is looking to hit the 100-partner mark in the UK after launching its new partner programme.
Scale currently has between 20 and 30 active UK partners, but wants to increase this dramatically as it targets the SMB market.
Scale EMEA managing director Johan Pellicaan told CRN that the vendor is looking to displace the likes of VMware and Nutanix, claiming that these solutions are not set up to be effective for SMBs.
"The cost of virtualisation licensing is rising every year," he said. "I don't think there is a single customer that runs VMware, for example, where their costs have gone down. The average cost has gone up over the years and that penalty becomes bigger and bigger.
"If you look at IT organisations that have one to five IT people, they feel a lot of pressure to keep the wheels rolling."
"[We want] partners that love to fight the traditional order and are open to bringing change to their customers, instead of looking only at revenue. If you look at what we are replacing it's the traditional three-two-one [infrastructure] where they have HP servers, EMC storage, and virtualisation being VMware - that is what we see in about 80 per cent of what we are replacing with a new Scale solution."
Pellicaan explained that Scale is looking to recruit partners who want to "fight the traditional order" of infrastructure providers and give SMB users a solution that is cheaper and more tailored to the SMB market.
The new partner programme will have three tiers - Silver, Gold and Platinum - with all partners initially entering at the Silver tier.
The tiers will not have set revenue thresholds, but will be based on a reseller's activity with end users, and will have other criteria including providing a certain number of case studies each year.
The Platinum tier is accessible invite only and the criteria for this will be discussed with resellers individually.
"We are looking to start with partners that are really active regionally in the SMB market," Pellicaan added. "That doesn't mean the partners that have one or two employees, but certainly I'm looking for partners that have a broad scale of customers in that SMB segment, in a specific region.
"The UK and Ireland region is ready to have 80 to 100 partners, especially given the type of customers we're trying to address, but also partners that have expertise in the distributed enterprise space such as retail [and] car dealerships."
Corbel Solutions signed up with Scale a couple of months ago and managing director Paul Lough said the amount of business the reseller does with incumbent vendors like HPE and Dell has already started to decrease.
"We're quoting more Scale now," Lough said. "We were traditionally selling HPE and we don't need to do that now because we are putting more quotes out with Scale instead of HP and Dell, so it will start to affect business.
"HPE have their VSA [virtual storage appliance] tools, Dell have their version of it, but they all seem to be far more complex than what Scale offers."