My Experience at MES16
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I recently had the pleasure of working my first trade show with Scale Computing at the Midsize Enterprise Summit (MES) in Austin, TX. I’ve worked and attended many trade shows in the past but I was unsure of what to expect because A) new company and coworkers and B) MES has a boardroom format I hadn’t seen before. Let me give you a preview of my summary: It was amazing.
As a premiere sponsor of the event, we had the opportunity to present our solution to all 13 of the boardrooms at the show. MES is a show that Scale Computing has attended regularly for years because of our midmarket focus. As we went from boardroom to boardroom, wheeling our live, running HC3 cluster, we encountered a great mix of attendees from ardent fans and friends, familiar faces, and new faces.
If you’ve been following along with Scale Computing, you know we’ve had a big year in terms of product releases and partnerships. We’ve rolled out, among other things, hybrid storage with flash tiering, DRaaS, VDI with Workspot, and we were able to announce a new partnership at MES with Information Builders for Scale Analytics. We were fortunate enough to have Ty Wang from Workspot with us to promote our joint VDI solution.
As Jeff Ready, our founder and CEO, presented in each boardroom, it was clear that the managers of midmarket IT were understanding our message. There was a definite sense that, like us, our peers working in IT administration were seeing the need for simple infrastrastructure that delivered solutions like virtualization, VDI, DR, analytics, as an alternative to traditional virtualization and vendors like VMware.
In the evenings, when the attendees were able to visit our booth, it was encouraging to hear from so many IT directors and managers that they’re fed up with the problems that our HC3 solution was solving and that our prices that we displayed in our booth were exceeding their expectations. It is really a testament to our entire team that our product and message seemed to resonate so strongly.
I will also note that there was another vendor, whom I will not name, at the show who offers what they call a hyperconverged infrastructure solution. That vendor really brought their “A” game with a much higher level of sponsorship than Scale Computing. This being my first show, I expected us to be overshadowed by their efforts. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When the attendee voting was tallied at the awards ceremony, we walked away with three awards including Best of Show.
It was only one amazing trade show in the grand scheme of things, but it has really cemented in my mind that Scale Computing is changing IT for the midmarket with simplicity, scalability, and availability at the forefront of thought.
