In his spotlight, Dale shares how 2026 is all about sharpening Climb’s edge as the Emerging Vendor distributor: enabling vendors to scale faster through smarter connectivity, deeper channel relationships, and a line card built with intention. His perspective offers a strong look at where the industry is heading — and how Climb is helping partners accelerate into that future.
Read Dale’s full interview below.
What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2026?
The biggest opportunity for Climb in 2026 is focussed on the fine tuning of our line card. We will continue to focus on transaction efficiency between our vendor and customer partners to speed the process of launching and expanding our emerging vendor portfolio. Our focus is to be branded as the Emerging Vendor distributor selling Challenger vendors in Gartner’s upper left quadrant. We are constantly analysing and engaging with our partner community to see where there are gaps in our go to market plans. It’s about being focussed and ensuring our partner vendors understand the scale and reach Climb can bring to enhance their channel strategy.
What are the key technology investments you plan to make in 2026?
The key technology investments we are planning for 2026 are all about connectivity between our vendors and our customers. At Climb, we see ourselves as that connector, vetting out technology products and then delivering them to a customer base in the most efficient way possible. 2026 is all about how we can be more streamlined. The efficiency is really in the connections – whether it’s API, or EDI connections, or a proprietary connection with a vendor, and then linking that down to our customer base and integrating with their respective systems. So, think of it as one vendor to a few distributors, and then to the multitudes of resellers, MSPs, or integrators. We’re selling software and software licenses and services, so a lot of it should be done by technology automation allowing our teams to focus on selling and supporting our customers with emerging technology products.
What impact do you expect AI to have on the business you and your partners do together in 2026?
Our approach is quite unique in that Climb will be using AI internally more than we’re going to be selling it. This goes back to my previous thoughts on driving efficiency across the organization. Of course, we’ll be selling AI — but this will be embedded in all of the vendor products we carry as they continue to enhance their offerings to deliver cutting edge technology products. Our plan internally is to leverage AI to speed many of the complex task we perform every day.
What do you see as the toughest challenges facing customers in 2026?
The toughest challenge, when I talk to customers, is them trying to pick the next winning vendors that they should be taking to their customer base. We understand firsthand the energy and resources required to vet vendors. Our customers have the same challenges that we do; our job is to be that funnel for them in pre-screening vendor technology and how they plan on delivering their products to the market. The challenge for them is saying: should I pick product A over product B if I’m going to take it out to my sales team? Why am I doing that? What is the customer acceptance? What is the market acceptance? Then they need to assess whether the vendor has the wherewithal to really roll out and help the channel in the market. So, we want to continue to be that vetting arm for them, I think its one of their biggest challenges. There are so many vendors coming out of the startup phase. We did a quick analysis and 10 years ago there were 4000 new software technology products in Climbs defined echo system coming into the market in an 18-month time frame. In the last 18 months there are more than 8000. At Climb, we have vetted over 1000 in the last four years alone.
What is the key to success for your channel partners in 2026?
The key has and will always be for us – relationships. In good relationships, the closer and deeper you have with your vendors and sales reps the faster everything moves. In the age of AI where everything is hyper-speed, getting things done quickly matters more than ever. The relationships we build, and nurture is why we are different from our counterparts. When I talk to the exec team at the vendors we’ve signed, they say “Wait a second, you’re telling me that I could fly into Denver and meet with your field rep and he could take me into five resellers that they work with?” And I say “yes”. The vendors simply wouldn’t get that service from any of our competitors. So, for us, it’s all about “Old School” relationship building and selling speed.
Fill in the blank: My top priority for 2026 is:
I am so focused on our cloud platform. We’ve done an ERP implementation and that is 90% complete. But what is going to go along side of of that is an additional platform/marketplace to enhance our interface with our customers, whether they’re MSPs or Var’s, and even all the way to the DMR level. So, getting that implementation right is my top priority for 2026. We have Climb Expedition right now, which we use heavily in the European market because of our Microsoft relationship, and we are starting to use it more in the US after our DSS acquisition that brought with it a relationship with Adobe. Our plan is to more than double our current 15 vendors that we support on Expedition.
