For the third-part in our series on Scale Computing’s wins for this year’s CRN ARC Awards, we thought we’d spend time to explore how our focus on innovation tipped the scales in our favor in the Converged/Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Desktop/Server Virtualization categories.
At a high level, we scored 92.8 for the product innovation subcategory in the Converged/Hyperconverged Infrastructure award and further demonstrated our propensity for innovation with a winning score of 85.3 in the managed and cloud services subcategory. We repeated these successes in the Desktop and Server Virtualization award, with scores of 95.9 and 85.7, respectively.
Drilling down into the results, it's interesting to see that the weight placed by the judges on each subcategory ties back directly to partner and customer requirements. Product quality and reliability, the richness of product features and technical innovation, for example, are ranked by the judges as the three most critical assessment criteria for both awards. These are also the three pillars on which we build all our solutions and the basis for our long and short term product roadmaps. As such it was extremely gratifying to outperform our closest competitors in this subcategory for both awards.
Looking more closely at the actual scores, in the Desktop/Server Virtualization award, we gained the highest marks of all the vendors in each of the product innovation and managed and cloud services subcategories. Breaking it down, we received:
- 104.6 for quality and reliability
- 97.3 for the richness of product features
- 96.8 for technical innovation
- 95.9 for compatibility
- 88.0 for marketability
- 93.0 for services opportunity
In the Converged/Hyperconverged Infrastructure award, (where we came first for product reliability), we received:
- 100.2 for product reliability
- 97.9 for technical innovation
- 93.0 for compatibility
- 87.5 for services opportunity
These are incredible victories, and, looking back on them today, I’m incredibly proud of our achievements.
Now, I want to take a moment to specifically focus on the product reliability criteria as the judges regard this as the number one, most important, top dollar measurement across both awards. The judges were looking for tangible evidence of reliability, robustness, performance, scalability from each vendor. None of these qualities would be possible within a hyperconverged solution without tireless innovation, non-stop development, and an irrepressible desire to shake up the market. This is where Scale Computing truly excels, so I am thrilled that we were able to deliver the goods in this area.
This level of innovation also means partners can seamlessly deploy new appliances for their customers—even into a running cluster without disrupting any workloads, and they can deploy VDI at an SMB or enterprise-scale with equal ease and confidence. They can also join together different Scale Computing or multi-vendor solutions with different capacities to elegantly grow their IT network as more resources are needed. This represents some of the most advanced innovation within the hyperconverged and virtualized market, and is integral to our customers’ and partners’ success.
The judges viewed the richness of product technical innovation as joint number two most important subcategories. We agree on that point as the importance of technical innovation in our industry can’t be overstated. If technical innovation is lacking, then customers immediately start to suffer. To win this category in both awards, Scale Computing had to demonstrate that it was a technical leader with the ability to deliver cloud and XaaS capabilities to its customers.
We feel that the quality and reliability of our offsite and cloud-based disaster recovery as a service does just that. For our partners, that functionality, in particular, means that, by installing a Scale Computing solution, they can virtually eliminate planned and unplanned downtime. Our MSP Program also speaks to this as this ensures that MSPs will not only find an affordable, flexible, peer-recommended solution with high customer satisfaction, but also a variety of service options covering a wide variety of use cases across nearly every industry. Now that's innovation and market disruption!
I can’t wrap up this blog without highlighting our score in the profit margin and profit potential subcategory; Scale Computing scored a superb 91.7 in the Converged/Hyperconverged Infrastructure award and even more impressive 97.2 in the Desktop/Server Virtualization award.
This was another crucial victory for us as it is the highest-ranking assessment criteria for the managed services category. Scale Computing can deliver high profit margins to its partners precisely because of the innovative way in which it lowers end-user TCO for IT infrastructure. HC3, for example, has been specifically designed to reduce as many IT infrastructure costs as possible—including unplanned downtime, management, maintenance, training, and consulting.
While other solutions that integrate technology from multiple vendors can add complexity and push up costs, the innovation that underpins Scale Computing's offering brings all the benefits of a multi-vendor IT infrastructure without all the headaches, stress, and financial outlay. This, of course, reflects very well on our partners. Their customers see them as heroes for delivering cost savings, simple deployment, and robust IT resources. The CRN ARC award win, and our recent CRN Tech Innovator award win for the HE500 series, proves that at Scale Computing, the desire to innovate drives everything we do—it’s in our DNA.