‘7 Minutes’ with Kevin Greenwood, Senior Director, Global Channels, Scale Computing

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

Scale Computing competes in the hyperconverged infrastructure market against players including Nutanix, Pivot3, HPE, Cisco Systems and VMware. In fact, Cisco just dropped $320 million to get Springpath’s distributed file system purpose-built for hyperconvergence, signaling the networking giant’s faith in the future of HCI.

Scale Computing’s differentiators include a decade in the HCI business, affordability and the ability to customize systems for a customer’s needs. While its roots are in the SMB market and academic vertical, Scale has been working to gain larger customers, with the help of a growing channel ecosystem. In the most recent quarter, it’s closed five Fortune 500 deals and released two new hyperconverged appliances, one of them sized to support such resource-intensive workloads as data warehousing, CAD and medical imaging with up to 77 TB of hybrid flash storage per node. Like Nutanix, Scale bundles virtualization software with storage, servers, compute and management, reducing licensing costs.

Scale Computing’s Kevin Greenwood

We asked Kevin Greenwood, the company’s senior director of global channel sales, why partners should take advantage of his program.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Kevin Greenwood: Scale Computing integrates servers, storage and virtualization into a single platform to deliver simple, highly available and scalable infrastructure. Our secret sauce is our simplicity, affordable price point and support team. Unlike others in the industry, we offer a built-in hypervisor, alleviating the need for VMware and expensive VMware software licensing. There is also an advantage of custom building Scale Computing HC3 hyperconverged systems from the ground up, which gives us a blank canvas for creating solutions that match our end customer needs.

HC3 offers a mix-and-match node support model. Customers can start with any node models that fit their current needs, yet should their future node needs call for substantially more capacity and/or performance, HC3 also supports this.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features?

KG: Scale Computing announced an updated program called Scale Partner Community (SPC) in February 2017. The program focuses on the expansion of our channel in both North America and EMEA by creating a community of profitable, growth-focused and value-adding distributors and partners.

The program consists of four tiers: Referral, Silver, Gold and Platinum. The Scale Partner Community recognizes each partner’s unique capabilities and includes benefits and requirements consistent with their commitment to selling and supporting Scale Computing solutions. The Scale Partner community offers various options including referral partner (individual or company), reseller service partner (reseller or managed cloud service provider) and distribution partner.

All Scale Partners must complete …