Climb Channel Solutions Acquires Education-Focused Distributor: Exclusive

‘This is good for us all the way around,’ says Dale Foster, CEO of Climb Channel Solutions. ‘We have the field teams that will walk into accounts and go deeper, and our goal is to expand the Adobe relationship as we grow.’

Climb Channel Solutions has acquired Douglas Stewart Software, a software distributor to the education market in North America, to further service clients in K-12 and higher education.

Madison, WI-based DSS provides software and hardware to the education sector and services more than 500 value-added resellers (VARs) and 250 campus stores across the U.S. Climb is acquiring the software distribution side of the business, which comes with 20 new vendor partnerships.

DSS has about $185 million in revenue and 36 employees, all of whom are joining Climb in the acquisition.

The $20.3 million deal closed on July 31, according to Climb.

“This is good for us all the way around,” Dale Foster, CEO of Eatontown, N.J.-based Climb, told CRN in an exclusive interview. “We have the field teams that will walk into accounts and go deeper, and our goal is to expand the Adobe relationship as we grow.”

Foster (pictured) said DSS has a strong focus on distributing the Adobe software platform and that Climb has plans to build out products around it.

“One of the things that resellers came back to us with is, ‘I just wish I could buy more from you,’” he said. “We think we can take this to the resellers that are asking for more, give them a bigger bandwidth of products and give them training on that.”

Chuck Hulan, Douglas Stewart CEO, told CRN that leveraging the software-centric infrastructure that Climb has built will help DSS and its team to “rapidly innovate on the types of solutions and services we can provide to Climb’s vendors and bring new customers to our existing supplier partners too.”

“We will bring education-specific customer analysis and targeting to applicable Climb vendors to help extend and expand their business,” he said. “We plan to combine the progress we had already been making to build a cloud marketplace with Climb’s existing Expedition platform to offer a solution for partners that leads the way in the education market. “

Charles Bass, vice president of alliances and marketing at Climb, told CRN that in more than half of the U.S. states, the largest employer is a university system, “We think there's a huge opportunity there.”

“I feel like we're going to be able to do something there with many of our products that we haven't done before,” he said.

Foster said going forward Climb is on the “acquisition trail” and is taking a closer look at the government sector.

“But their culture is so similar to ours,” he said of DSS. “They care about their customers…they treat them as the gold in the company. That cultural fit is going to be really good for us right off the bat. If it wasn't, we wouldn't do any of the deals that we've done.”