Scale Computing Launches New MSP Program With Price-Per-Node Subscription Licensing

Scale Computing is striving to drive hyper-converged infrastructure midmarket sales through a new partner program that arms solution providers with a flexible pricing model that reduces customer capital expenditure while providing new service opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs).

Solution providers that join Scale's new MSP Program can now offer customers a price-per node, per-month, OpEx subscription license for its flagship HC3 hyper-converged solution.

"This makes the customer barrier to entry easier for us," said Joel Althoff, President of Monticello, Iowa-based Infrastructure Technology Solutions, who partners with Scale. "You don’t want to make it hard for customers to buy from you. Typically, we would be asking these customers to do a purchase or a lease of a cluster, and now we don’t have to do that. … Scale's doing a great thing to allow partners to be more flexible with customers which is needed today."

[Related: Scale Computing Attacking 'Over Distributed' VMware With New Ingram Micro Partnership]

Partners can purchase Scale and Lenovo hardware-based HC3 appliances or as a complete on-premise data center solution where channel partners can add services on top. The program will provide partners the opportunity to sell additional services including Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, Infrastructure as-a-Service and Remote Management as-a-Service.

Scott Mann, director of Scale's North America Channel, said the program was built to give faster return on investment (RIO) and not force customers to pay large CapEx costs.

"So they're not taking a large CapEx hit up front and then having to make an RIO over 12-plus months. We want them to be able to make a return on investment immediately and for partners to be able to sell additional services," said Mann, in an interview with CRN.

Dave Hallmen, chief revenue officer at Scale, said the company is also lowering the management cost so partners who join the program can make more profits.

"We are offering a passthrough on the hardware units. Those units are purchased at cost and then they sell a subscription-based license anywhere from one to up to three years, and they're able to pay as they grow with more Scale or services," said Hallmen. "We came up with this model that positions us right in the heart of where most channel partners are focusing their business model in: the midmarket."

With more than 2,500 customers, HC3 integrates storage, servers and virtualization software into an all-in-on application based system that can be installed in under an hour and upgraded with no downtime. HC3 is based on the company's HyperCore operating system that includes an integrated KVM-based hypervisor and scale-out single storage pool featuring snapshots, cloning and automated tiering data services.

Scale, named a 'Niche Player' in research firm Gartner's 2018 Magic Quadrant For Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, allows customers to mix and match different nodes in a high-availability cluster that scales from three to eight HC3 nodes, with the ability to centrally manage up to 25 clusters using HC3's web-based user interface.

Hallmen said his privately-held Indianapolis, Ind.-based company is growing revenue "well above" 50 percent this year while its channel-based is rapidly expanding. "We've placed our strategy on the channel," he said, regarding Scale's 100-percent channel approach.

Althoff said his solution provider is seeing double-digit growth in its Scale business this year. "This new program shows they're listening to what is needed out there and creates a good opportunity for us to get our foot in the door in places where maybe before we would have come in and recommended a purchase of the solution, whereas now we can offer that as the monthly service as well," he said. "I suspect we'll see more rapid adoption of [hyper-convergence] this year."