Hi channel insiders. I'm Katie Baboso here for partner POV on site at scale computing platform 2025 in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm being joined by IT innovators and experts from all over the world. Today, including these two gentlemen joining me right now. We have Mark Isayan, general manager of KME Systems. Welcome, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. We also have Jack Arenss, director of IT at Kurasushi USA. Welcome.
Hi Katie, thanks for having us. Thank you so much for being a part of this today. Jack, we're going to get started with you and talk a little bit about Kura Sushi. So, let me make sure I get my stats right because you keep opening restaurants faster than I can write them down. You're an international restaurant chain with over 500 locations worldwide, 76 here in the US alone. I know you have a robust internal IT team. So, why do you leverage partners and scale computing?
Talk to me about that relationship. Yeah, Katie. Uh, that is correct. We do have a very um well-trained internal team. We do have a lot of technology in our restaurant and some of that has come from Japan. So, it's important that we have our technology team inhouse to support those systems. However, we do need external sources like Mark and KME to help us out and keep us moving forward in the right direction. that allows our team to focus on the daily operations of those services and we can leverage Mark and his world as more of a a friendship, a trusted partner to help us think about how we can drive technology at the uh next level outside of just the Kura technology.
Mark helped us bring in scale and and we're extremely excited about the that partnership and everything that he's been able to do for us. Talk to me about why it's so important that you leverage a company like Scale Computing to be able to avoid downtime at your restaurants where it's so important that you have that value from customers who say they're great that their opinions matter. Uh you're absolutely right. Downtime in the restaurant is extremely painful on both our guests and our teams in the restaurant.
You just happen to mention you've seen long wait times at a restaurant that can just be amplified if our systems go down. So we need the most robust infrastructure in place that we can uh possibly put together. Scale has been a great step forward in that direction. So we have upped our resources at our corporate office which has allowed our restaurants to operate more seamlessly and uh taken time and effort away from our operators servicing our technology needs. dumping that back more on my team to keep that off their plate so they can focus on entertaining our guests, giving them the great experience and making sure that they come back to Kurasushi again and again because of the uninterrupted uh technology experience.
Talk to me about how the implementation went with Scale Computing's technology for Kurasushi USA. How do you plan to grow with them in the future? Our overall implementation was extremely seamless and actually very efficient. We've done a lot of rollouts in the past and the scale implementation was extremely easy for my team and with the support of Mark and his world, it it made it even easier. Currently, we do have the deployment at our uh RSSE, our restaurant support center.
Uh and we do have a failback uh server out here in Vegas. Additionally, we are looking forward to uh possibly expanding our scale footprint to our actual uh restaurants throughout the country. Mark, let's bring you into the conversation and thank you so much for your patience. KME system serves as an advocate for Kurasushi. Talk to me about the value that you find within the scale computing ecosystem. What is it like having them as essentially an extension of your team?
I think the great benefit of the ecosystem is that they think like scale does. They're all about the customer advocacy. What can we do to help understand what's going on at the customer site? What does our technology do to add? So Mark, you used to be a VMware partner several years ago. Yes. Talk to me about the experience that you had there that led you to become a scale computing partner and was it scale computing for you all the way? It was we had a significant VMware practice and then scale came to us and explained to us the difference that they brought to the table.
And when I started to recognize that it was easier for the client, easier for my engineers and just an overall better process what they brought to the table, we pretty quickly recognized we had to run that internally and let it go to our clients. It was just a phenomenal experience that they brought to the table and we've never looked back.
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