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?"