I’ll start with a little heads-up, because this one definitely lives in the "insider chatter” bucket. There’s no press release, no official breadcrumbs, nothing you can just Google and point at. You kind of "it pays to know the people" or just be close enough to the circle to validate any of it, but from how you’re talking about their conferences, every year, and so on, I’d guess you can sanity-check at least parts of what I'm telling here or about to tell. So, the Scale story... Take it with a truckload of salt if you want, treat it like valley gossip, or go ping your network and see what lines up. At some point, when VMware started stepping on rakes with all the subscription-only and "lets triple the quotes" stuff, Scale’s CEO had what probably felt like a genius play, which is buy back VMware licenses, sometimes even take hardware off prospects’ hands, then flip those customers onto Scale’s stack plus new Scale-branded servers. Super-seductive pitch, and it really worked! Sales popped, and everyone loved the story, except… VMware licenses aren’t really transferable, and that customer hardware, it’s basically dead weight. Lab it, demo it, donate it, or just write it off and move on. So sure, revenue charts looked like a clean hockey stick, but CAC which is "Customer Acquisition Cost" was quietly going through the roof. For quite a while, the board and VCs were allegedly getting the curated version of the sales pitch, which is lots of growth, lots of momentum, very pretty slides, and not so much focus on the part where the economics didn’t actually make sense, but cash always tells the truth, and at some point the investors, including Morgan Stanley, did the math and that didn’t land well. Scale's CEO gets pushed out, there’s talk of legal action, CFO goes missing, and suddenly you’re in shutdown and fire-sale place. Company gets sold at a loss, something like 20M under only Morgan Stanley invested capital from what I hear, and liquidation preferences mean one party, and it's MS people, is "fine" while everyone else basically gets zeroed. Investors, shareholders, everyone! Then you look at the team and it tells the rest of the story, which is engineering is thinning out hard, CTO moves to a competitor, something-about-the-nodes, VP Sales shows up at DataCore, CRO lands at Stor-stinking-Magic and it goes and it goes. Do a quick LinkedIn sweep and it feels like a quiet evacuation, so whether you were a fan or not, the tune right now is pretty clear. Yes, they’re still around, but it doesn’t exactly feel like a long runway situation.