Climb Global Solutions trio talk 2024 goals, European expansion and acquisitions
Where in Europe is the distributor targeting and should we expect more acquisitions this year? CRN finds out
Climb Global Solutions made waves in October with its acquisition of Irish VAD DataSolutions and plans to keep this momentum in 2024 with bigger and bolder growth plans.
The deal helps the US-based distributor with its target to grow across Western Europe with the variety of vendors DataSolutions brings.
In this Q&A, Dale Foster, CEO, Charles Bass, VP alliances, and Gerard Brophy, CRO fill CRN in on everything they have planned for Climb Global Solutions this year.
What was your highlight of 2023?
Foster: "The DataSolutions acquisition."
Bass: "For sure DataSolutions was the highlight of our year."
Brophy: "From an EMEA perspective, if you look at our individual regions they've all grown.
"Our French entity has scaled nicely. The Benelux business and team in Amsterdam has scaled significantly.
"A real highlight for me was one of the strategies from a business point of view is to start to give our vendors a true global feel. What we've seen real success with is integrating some of the North American vendors into the EMEA market. And likewise, we've brought some of the contracts from the EMEA side across into the US."
What do you want to achieve by the end of 2024?
Foster: "We've embarked on ERP, company wide, and that will go live in 2024. So that is the number one goal and the background to that is we've got to be on the same page as far as efficiencies in the business.
"We do a lot of the same things, whether it's the US, Europe, UK, and beyond, as far as how we go to market. The DNA culture is great and we have to have a system to support that in a global way. We need to speak the same language when it comes to our ERP."
Bass: "We're attempting to look like a global company. It ends up North Americans looking more like Europe, which is a good thing. Gerard has a healthy, stable global services business that does level one and two support for some of our brands.
"Most of those resources and capability reside in Europe and we would like to see a critical mass of infrastructure in North America in 2024 as well. That's a big play for us."
Brophy: "Something I'm really looking forward to seeing this year is how the major cloud service providers (CSP) start scaling with distribution in general.
"If you go back ten years ago the major players were a bit of a concern for distribution.
"We thought Amazon were going to take that market, but what we found over the last three or four years is that those big CSPs don't have the reach that distribution partners have. It's all about workloads for them.
"I think they need to start looking at distribution partners globally to help scale the workload that they're looking for. So that's something I'm looking forward to seeing how that's gonna turn out towards the end of the year."
Up next: Climb's strategy for Europe...
Climb Global Solutions trio talk 2024 goals, European expansion and acquisitions
Where in Europe is the distributor targeting and should we expect more acquisitions this year? CRN finds out
Tell me about your plans for the European market this year.
Foster: "I'll start with why we're here. If you look at the consolidation in distribution, talking about North America, Charles and I go back to a day where we were working for a distributor similar in size to Gerard and CDS Group, and he sold it to Ingram Micro in 2012.
"And we were one of the last ones at that size, around $120m to sell in NA.
"There's no real targets in the US and as part of our strategic plan, when we came over to what was Lifeboat Distribution and is now Climb, even then we were one of the larger ones of the small disties outside of the big three.
"There were no real targets. Our first acquisition was in Canada, but then we saw we were organically growing by emerging vendors that were coming into the market all the time. So that was our home base.
"We had a good balance sheet that we could go after, and we said Western Europe was our target. We acquired CDF Group first, and shout out to Gerard, we were looking for somebody to run our EMEA group, and we acquired his company in 2022. And then it's Gerard's plan and our plans to continue to expand through acquisition and organic growth to the rest of Europe."
Brophy: "From a target perspective, it's no different to anybody else. We're looking at the key growth regions, the ones that adopt emerging tech.
"Whilst we have a very significant business in Benelux and France, regions like the Nordics, Southern Europe, Spain, Italy, are key areas of focus for us. Turkey and South Africa as well."
Can we expect more M&A from Climb this year? Read on to find out...
Climb Global Solutions trio talk 2024 goals, European expansion and acquisitions
Where in Europe is the distributor targeting and should we expect more acquisitions this year? CRN finds out
Should we expect more acquisitions from Climb in 2024?
Foster: "Contrary to what I said about North America, there are a lot of targets in Western Europe and beyond.
"We've more than dipped our toe in the water. We've hired some people in France so that we can get to know that market and maybe there's a target there.
"So we're gonna look through that area. Western Europe is still the focus, like I said, there's a lot distributors.
"If I take a look at our last two acquisitions, which were Spinnaker and DataSolutions, if we can find companies like those two that the DNA is the same it is so in line with our philosophy, our go-to-market, what we consider important to the customers.
"We do have a lot of targets and are talking to quite a few. But we'll be selective and seeing where this fits in. We have a strategic plan for acquisitions, whether it's a geographic reach, it's a team that we want to add to our team or whether it's vendors."
Continue reading to hear Climb's plans around AI and managed services...
Climb Global Solutions trio talk 2024 goals, European expansion and acquisitions
Where in Europe is the distributor targeting and should we expect more acquisitions this year? CRN finds out
What are your key areas for investment?
Foster: "It probably gets overused, but it's AI.
"So many of the vendors that we currently have are building AI into their products in one subset. Microsoft has its Copilot that they're launching, and it's going throughout all their different business units starting with Outlook and then going on even to their ERP and their Dynamics.
"We'll double down on that. "We use the 50 per cent rule, if it's more AI than it would go into that division, and then we'll invest in the talent inside of Climb that need technical resources to really support that division."
Bass: "Even though we're trying to be a global company we consider ourselves to have a Western European-style strategy in North America, which means a limited line card where we're far more service capable and provide more sales and engagement value.
"We only carry 100 brands, and we have six different categories for our brands. Our biggest by far is security, but we also do connectivity, hyper converged, cloud and virtualisation, data movement, data management, and then we do application lifecycle management DevOps tools.
"The idea was to simplify the line card, but also the cross sell. So that investment has been fairly consistent that we're consistently trying to invest in a smaller number of better performing brands and we'll continue to do that.
"But I would say other key investments is we're developing a cloud marketplace under the Climb logo, which is a pretty important investment for us."
Brophy: "The overall growth in the markets is going to come from support services and AI.
"AI is everywhere. We have the underlying platforms to sell from a product perspective, but it's the support services that are going to accelerate right across the globe from an AI point of view.
"Also from a managed service point of view, certainly from security, most MSSP models is a key area for us to continue to invest and build managed services."
What are Climb's main challenges currently?
Foster: "Frustrations with spending.
"We want to have alignment with a lot of our vendors but we do have different goals in different areas, depending on the vendors that are investing in us.
"The frustrations we have are when the vendors state their go-to-market strategy, and it's really not exactly that.
"The good thing is when they get the right channel team in place and that's their chosen route to market it's such a great fit for us, it makes it easy and we can spend fewer cycles on that.
"But the challenges are, are we aligned with our go-to-market?"