‘We’ve been talking about this marketplace for two years, and I can finally honestly say that we will have a marketplace. I’m going to call it more of a platform. It’ll be much more self-service if they choose that, and it’ll have white labeling for their end users to use their own store,’ says Climb Global Solutions CEO Dale Foster.
Climb Global Solutions is preparing to launch a new distribution platform in the second quarter of 2027, a key investment CEO Dale Foster said will give MSPs and resellers a more streamlined way to manage their businesses, and help the distributor better serve its growing MSP customer base.
The Eatontown, N.J.-based company is also targeting another year of expansion, with plans to complete three acquisitions and deepen its European vendor relationships.
“We’ve been talking about this marketplace for two years, and I can finally honestly say that we will have a marketplace,” Foster told CRN. “I’m going to call it more of a platform. It’ll be much more self-service if they choose that, and it’ll have white labeling for their end users to use their own store.”
Rather than navigating dozens of individual marketplaces, partners will be able to aggregate purchases, licensing and consumption-based billing through a single platform.
“If you’re an MSP, do you want to go to 60 marketplaces to get your stuff, then try to consolidate that and deal with consolidated invoicing?” Foster said. “Distribution really has a place in that. If you’re buying 10 products from us, you can aggregate everything in one place. You can look at consumption billing, licensing and things like that, and you’re going to get much of the same support from our team.”
Foster said platform investments will accelerate next year, with the technology being built specifically around its vendor portfolio and the needs of its MSP and reseller partners.
The platform is part of a broader push into automation and connectivity. Climb has grown the team that links it with vendors and trading partners through APIs and other integrations.
“We’ve had more trading partners connected to our platform this year than ever before, and next year will be even bigger,” Foster said. “We can eliminate all the mindless stuff of moving product spreadsheets and SKUs around and just get back to selling products and delivering that.”
International growth remains a major priority for Climb as well, which has expanded its European footprint through acquisitions over the past several years. Its latest deal, France-based distributor NeoVAD, added about 300 resellers and strengthened its presence in cybersecurity, cloud services and virtualization. The October acquisition followed earlier expansion into the U.K., Ireland and Greece.
Foster said an in-country presence is central to Climb’s European strategy.
“French buy from French, Germans buy from Germans,” he said. “Even though you have the bigger distributors over there, people buy in-country. We want to be in-country instead of building everything ourselves.”
The expansion comes as Climb last month reported record results in its recent quarter. Net sales for the third quarter reached $220.3 million, up 37 percent year over year, with record gross billings, gross profit and net income. Nineteen of its top 20 vendors grew, while Adobe fell 3 percent amid changes to its VIP marketplace program.
Foster credited cybersecurity, which is about 70 percent of Climb’s business.
“Everybody is adding security, even now with AI more than anything,” he said.
