Climb will take a leaf from private equity’s book and undergo a “pretty aggressive M&A play” in western Europe, its CEO has revealed.
The Nasdaq-listed distributor – which ranked 17th in Oxygen’s 2026 Must-Know Distributors and Marketplaces – last week made its first European acquisition since 2023 in the shape of Greece-based Interworks.cloud.
Microsoft and Acronis ally Interworks serves 600 partners across Southeastern Europe.
But talking to IT Channel Oxygen, CEO Dale Foster revealed Climb is now in talks with multiple targets in Germany and France as it looks to kickstart “aggressive” M&A activity in the region.
“We’re the fastest of the turtles”
As well as swelling its European Microsoft CSP business beyond the magic $30m marker, Interworks will sharpen Climb’s marketplace nous, Foster indicated.
This will aid Climb in its goal of growing self-service to 40% of its business over the next 12 months, with Foster acknowledging its inside sales teams are currently “slaves to their inboxes”.
“The nice thing about Interworks is they do everything on their marketplace,” he said.
“We’ve got a great opportunity to take that organically through our German office, through the Netherlands and France.
“We love to say that we sell speed, but we’re the fastest of the turtles in the room and are still doing things slow. We have all the technology tools out there. We should be using them.”
Although Climb had been in dialogue with Interworks for around four years, a deal only became possible after it split its distribution business from its marketplace arm (‘Infiterra’) last year.
Climb is one of around 30-50 cloud marketplace customers for Infiterra, Foster said.
“[Interworks MD] Stamatis [Barbounakis] was on both the Infiterra and Interworks side, so he has influence over the development team because they’re all family, so we think we can help influence the roadmaps,” he said.
“At the same time, Microsoft made this rule saying, ‘hey, if you’re not $30m… So it meant the timing was really good.”
“We’re going to run a private-equity play”
Microsoft’s new $30m revenue requirement for direct CSPs has fuelled furious M&A activity among smaller EMEA Microsoft distributors, just as predicted.
German Microsoft CSP QualityHosting secured investment from PE house PSG in October, while Irish CSP MicroWarehouse was snapped up by Canadian peer Sherweb in December 2024, for example.
Climb itself spoke to “a couple” of PE houses eager to acquire it or its CSP business, “because they knew where the threshold was, and knew we weren’t making it”, according to Foster.
“We said ‘no, we have our own plays’,” Foster explained.
“But we learned a lot from that.
“I got to know them very well, and here’s what they do: they come into an industry, and they go on the acquisition tear,” he said.
“We’re a public company, and we’re going to run a private-equity play, and it’s going to be in western Europe.
“We were held back by some reasons I can’t mention, but we’re released from that now and are going to go on that journey pretty fast.
“[We have] multiple targets in Germany and France. Some of them are Microsoft focused, and some just regionally focused.”
Foster said Climb will mimic PE by looking to make operational efficiencies post acquisition and “using debt if we have to”.
“We’re not going to get outside of our lane though – we’re not going to acquire somebody in the telco space. It’s going to be in SaaS – security, data movement and management, virtualisation – things like that,” he said.
“AI is not going to take over SaaS”
The Interworks acquisition came just ahead of Climb’s full-year 2025 results, which showed revenues rising 40% to $652.5m and gross income hitting $2.1bn.
Foster admitted Climb’s shares were last week “hit hard” amid fears over how AI will impact SaaS and cyber, but characterised the reaction as “laughable”.
“AI is not going to take over all the SaaS software,” he said.
“It’s like cloud was in 2006 – it took us ten years to make any money at it.”
Microsoft’s embrace of the concept of ‘Frontier firms’ – who it sees using AI to scale – will only play into Climb’s hands, EMEA COO Matthew Whitton said, meanwhile.
“The Frontier Distribution Designation was only announced in November, and we will be getting those requirements,” he said.
“Frontier companies, like the London Stock Exchange, are the people that are really drinking the Microsoft Kool Aid – and that’s us.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
