Specialism: Software and cybersecurity
Key vendors: VAST, Citrix, ManageEngine, SolarWinds, Quest, Canonical, SmartBear, Cloudian, ControlUp, Flexera
UK revenue: £120.4m (+38%)
Headcount: 136 (UK), 170 (EMEA)
Boasting a focus on ‘Challenger’ vendors, US-headquartered Climb Channel Solutions is now doing “north of $200m” sales in EMEA, its CEO Dale Foster (pictured top, middle) told us in September.
This follows its acquisitions of UK distributors Sigma and Spinnakar in 2020 and 2022, and Anglo-Irish VAD DataSolutions in October 2023.
The last filed accounts of Climb Global Solutions UK Ltd (which also include the contribution of its Grey Matter business), show calendar 2023 revenue hiking 38% to £120.4m. It chalked this up to the full-year impact of Spinnakar and ongoing growth of cloud-based software sales.
But Climb’s EMEA business is a lot larger now. It boasts trailing 12-month revenues of around $275m (£215m), including $141m (£110m) from DataSolutions, it told us.
Climb will continue to make one to two acquisitions a year, with the focus now moving to western Europe, Foster told IT Channel Oxygen.
“We are tracking at around 12%-15% growth in EMEA”
Quickfire Q&A with CRO Gerard Brophy
What is your sweet spot?
At Climb, we are intentionally focused on offering our partners access to emerging technologies. Our aim is not just to stick with what’s proven and profitable today but to invest in and support the technologies that will shape tomorrow. This approach is crucial for a few reasons.
First, it provides our partners with a competitive edge. By introducing them to innovative solutions early, they can differentiate themselves in the market and address evolving customer needs more effectively. Second, it mitigates risk. Relying heavily on a few major vendors can be precarious.
Our focus on emerging technologies allows us to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate what’s next. We are constantly exploring and integrating new solutions that have the potential to compete with, or even surpass, the current market leaders.
Which product, service or vendor has stood out for you in 2024?
VAST Data is the vendor that stands out.
If you look at the market and what’s happening and the relevance of technology AI obviously stands out – everyone’s talking about AI. Although they are a storage vendor, VAST Data is the platform really built for AI deep learning. Their use cases are very specific so they know exactly where they win and where they don’t. The deals we have been securing are significant too.
If you could change one thing about your business at the stroke of a wand, what would it be?
It has to be the squeezed margins that we have to work with.
When you are trying to run a successful business, it’s really all about EBITDA. The biggest challenge that all of the distribution market faces is the squeeze margins – and that’s why a key focus for Climb is to continuously provide value to our vendors. And we do that by delivering a first class service to our vendors and partners built on trust, speed and expertise.
When will the UK distribution market return to growth?
This really depends on what part of UK distribution you are focusing on. People were telling us 12+ years ago that hardware was dead and that the future was bleak. In our world, hardware – on the infrastructure side – is actually scaling.
We are tracking at around 12%-15% growth in EMEA. Our focus on virtualisation & cloud, security and data management is supporting that growth. What matters to Climb is relevance in the market and selling the right technologies to our partners.
What we find is that resellers that stay on top of what’s current and relevant continue to generate growth. These resellers never stand still and are always looking at ways to reinvent themselves. AI is a good example of this.
Name one area of your business where you are expecting to add staff in 2025
Our sales teams will see the biggest growth in numbers next year – the sales side has to be the most effective part of the business to deliver the growth we want to achieve. It’s all about having the right people with the right relationships.
At its Channel Forums EMEA in October, Canalys characterised AWS Marketplace as one of the world’s largest distributors, owing to its growing third-party software business. On balance, do you agree?
Yes I absolutely agree.
However, despite the size of AWS they still don’t have the channel scale that distribution has, and it’s no surprise that AWS are looking to add distributors to their organisation. In addition, AWS doesn’t have the skill set to advise partners on the up-sell or cross-sell. A partner will just ask for what they think they need whereas it is a distributor’s role to work with that partner to ensure that they maximise the size of the deal by adding certain technologies or certain solutions within that vendor. AWS can’t replace the distributor being the trusted advisor to the reseller.
If you could undertake a secret, two-week apprenticeship at another distributor to see how they roll, which would you choose?
I’d rather look across the industry and learn about how many distributors are able to operate alongside such small margins. We often get beaten in RFPs by distributors willing to accept half a percent in margin – anyone who has run a business realises it’s impossible to run a successful business on half a percent or 1% margin. Distributors that are prepared to take half a percent margin on selling technology tells me that they have nothing to add. This really hurts distribution globally.
See who made the wider Oxygen 50 Must-Know IT Distributors 2024 here.
