I'm thinking back to those early days uh post VMware's acquisition by Broadcom because of the moment that it was for scale computing and the catalyst that it was. You told me you would literally spend hours at night directly responding to the inbound forms on scale computing's website. You said you want scale computing to be for everybody. What does that mean and why was it so important for you to directly deliver that message? My vision of success is how many organizations and how many people can we help with our software solutions.
Whether that's a a tiny little company or a very large company, it it's another company being helped by the software solution. And that's what gets me excited. When everything happened with Broadcom and we saw this massive spike in inquiries, hey, I'm looking for an alternative. What do you guys have? the team we had set up wasn't big enough to handle all those inquiries. And so I said, "Well, I don't I don't want to leave everyone hanging, right?" Like, so I would just I would I would do my normal work through the day and then I would sit on the couch and and literally respond to inbound inquiries with these somewhat awkward like I really am the CEO uh kind of thing.
It didn't matter to me whether it was a Fortune 500 company. Some of them were and some of them were 100erson companies in places you know you've never heard of, right? All of that is totally fine because I wanted to help them and often in a way it's that smaller company that kind of needs the most help, right? They're the most adversely affected by the changes and just don't have the resources that they had spent any time thinking about what that could look like.
I really also want to touch on some of the economic headwinds that we're facing here in the US. A lot of those issues come down to we just don't know exactly what is going to happen a quarter from now, a year from now. we don't know what's going on or how to plan. How are you helping your partners guide your customers through these economic times knowing that they're probably extremely budget conscious and very cautious at the moment? The uncertainty has a an effect across the board, particularly in the mid-market.
Many midsize companies are privately held companies, often family businesses, and it is viewed as an expense. Maybe they're a manufacturer and the goods they import are going to get a big tariff. They're going to cut IT spend. Now, that doesn't mean the IT department has less to do. It just means they have less money to do it with. VMware raising pricing at the same time this happens is a double whammy, right? So, okay, we can help you get off of VMware.
We can help you with more affordable pricing and very often even downsize some of your infrastructure. Maybe you can you were thinking you needed to do a big refresh. Perhaps we can do a smaller refresh and over time just add to it, right? It's one of the benefits of the platform is that you can start small and grow in tight times that can help quite a bit. Here at Scale Computing Platform 2025, you actually shared your notebook like literal pictures of your notebook from the early 2000s when you founded the company discussing the trajectory that you were planning to take scale computing on.
How do you think you've stacked up to that? Talk to me about where you are now compared to then and do you think that you've accomplished that vision? It's almost unbelievable how on that plan we still are. I mean the number one competitor I identified was VMware. The market where we would start and expand from was the mid-market. The hardware vendors we could partner with were effectively Lenovo and Dell. We were right on. And I think what is has been very exciting for me is is not only seeing that that vision come together.
But now as we we're moving into this era of edge computing and seeing that okay it's not just about the infrastructure but it is going to be about the applications and the number of applications that will exist out at the edge won't be measured in you know ones and twos but will be measured in hundreds or thousands. That's a very exciting place to be. I I equated it to um where the cloud was, public cloud was in like 2010. People were moving applications from the data center to the cloud.
Ultimately, they were then building applications in the cloud. That's what's happening now at the edge. Many applications move to the edge today, but ultimately they will be built there with AI helping build applications. There's just going to be a massive amount of increase in that front. We set out with a a vision to be what we called the best ever partner that our customers or our partners would work with in their entire career. And and we don't mean that simply from a product standpoint or even from just a technology standpoint.
If a customer or partner were retiring and a news person showed up for some reason with a microphone and said, "Hey, before you walk out the door, tell me who was the best vendor that you worked with in your entire career. I want them to say scale computing.
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