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

If Lifeboat Distribution wasn’t on your radar, maybe Climb Channel Solutions should be. Climb is the rebranded and renamed, Lifeboat Distribution, a Wayside Technology Group company. While the company changed its name in May, two executives responsible for ushering in the distributor’s transformation joined the company more than two years ago.

Climb Channel Solutions’ Dale Foster

Dale Foster, CEO of Wayside, as of January 2020, initially came to Climb in January 2018 as executive vice president. Foster and Charles Bass, vice president, alliances and marketing at Climb, work together to redefine the company’s strategic direction and light a fire under what was a relatively inactive distributor.

It’s time to get to know Climb Channel Solutions and find out more about how the distributor is different from not only Lifeboat, but other distributors, and why partners might want to get to know Climb. To do that, Channel Futures chatted with Bass.

Channel Futures: So, goodbye Lifeboat Distribution, hello Climb. Why the rebranding and name change?

Charles Bass: We changed our name, but our parent company is still Wayside Technology Group, a publicly traded entity. That didn’t change. Lifeboat Distribution, which makes up the vast majority of revenue and gross margin at Wayside, wasn’t really a name that was tied to our strategic direction.

Lifeboat as a company had been fairly inactive. There were few boutique or specialty distributors left because everyone was acquired — except Lifeboat. That was because it was a distributor of last resort. They were essentially selling products that no one else wanted to distribute.

Climb Channel Solutions’ Charles Bass

So, when Dale and I came in, we changed the strategic direction of the company.

A New Direction

CF: What is Climb’s strategic direction today?

CB: The name change was precipitated on wanting to get away from the old name, but we also wanted to make connotations based on our strategic direction. We’re focused on emerging data center and cloud products. We’re in the business of incubating emerging brands in the U.S. and European markets.

Over 90% of our business is in the Americas, but we do some business in Europe.

CF: Tell us more about these emerging brands that you’re incubating.

CB: Lifeboat’s strategy three years ago was basically following the market. They were picking up what wasn’t being handled by Synnex, Ingram Micro, Arrow and Tech Data. They were trying to out-execute the market with better operations.

When [Dale] Foster and I came in, our contention was that being better at processing is like a bank saying, “We’re better at balancing your checkbook.” I’m not saying that’s not valuable, but the market doesn’t place great value on quote-to ship. The market values relationships and the ability to incubate, develop and sell through channels. And that’s what we started to do.

If you look at brand focus we have, I’m never going to sell Cisco. I’m going to sell Arista [Networks]. I’m not going to sell Dell EMC; [instead], I’m going to sell Cloudian. Everybody on our line card is an emerging player who is attempting to take a bite out of a mature player in the market with new and better technology.

Emerging Tech Focus

CF: What emerging technologies does Climb focus on?

CB: There are six categories that we chase. We’re trying to have between five to 10 brands in each of these six categories. We try to stay within our swim lanes.

The six categories are: storage and hyperconverged infrastructure; connectivity; security; cloud and virtualization; software and application lifecycle; and, data management/data movement.

Security is the one category that …