Climb Channel Solutions Eschews Cisco, Dell EMC, Rebrands from Lifeboat

… really sticks out. Security makes up over half of our business. Our biggest player by a wide margin in security is Sophos. But we’ve also had success this past year with Imperva and, a new, young company is Security Scorecard. I mention them because they’re an example of a product that makes many our other products better. What the product does is give you a rating on the effectiveness of your security from an outside view looking in. And then they make recommendations to improve your security. That’s where other players such as BitDefender, Imperva and Sophos come in.

Cleaning Up the Line Card

CF: How does Climb’s line card differ from Lifeboat’s line card?

CB: I’ll take you back two-and-a-half years ago. Lifeboat just finished a $307 million year. The company [had] moderate single-digit growth and they transacted about 250 brands.

Fast-forward to today — we’re transacting approximately 120 brands, less than half the number compared to two-and-a-half years ago. We just finished our year at $601 million. Our growth has significantly increased.

We’ve done two things. We put in place an alliance process where we continuously pursue and onboard emerging brands. And we put in a process where we continuously evaluate the brands we have on our line card and remove them from the line card.

We’ve evaluated approximately 100 companies in the last two years and we’ve created contractual relationships with about 50 of them. We also terminated about 120 companies. So we’re refreshing the product line.

CF: What partners work with Climb?

CB: We transact at about 4,000 VARs a month. If you look at our business, about 50% of our business is in the DMR (direct market reseller) space. Companies like CDW, SHI, SoftChoice, Zones, etc., and 50% are what I call OEM/independent VARs.

Our average VAR is not trying to be the eighth guy in Kansas City selling NetApp. Our average VAR wants to be the first guy in Kansas City selling Cloudian. That’s our VAR. Every major metro has that counter-cultural VAR trying to differentiate his business based on their offerings. There’s a niche in every market for that.

Cloud Marketplace in the Works

CF: What about cloud offerings?

CB: We have some interesting virtualization/cloud companies on our line card. But the strategic direction for our company in the next 90 days is to launch a self-service cloud marketplace. The big distributors have all done this.

We made the decision six months ago to acquire a cloud marketplace that was better than we could build. And it allows us to acquire that expertise.

CF: What’s the best way for partners to get to know Climb Channel Solutions?

CB: When we came on board, this was an operations-focused company. There were zero outside salespeople. We brought in eight sales guys that we pay like a VAR rep. The way they get paid is they get a slice of the gross margin they drive in their territories.

We have a very different sales mentality now. Before we were a processing company; now we’re a sales company.

The best way for any VAR to know us is to know our outside sales team. We bought Interwork [Technologies] because we wanted some of their DNA. They had a couple of outside sales guys, but they had inside sales people that were outbound. They did a great job using tools to aggressively sell into their VAR base and manufacturer base.