Slide’s Flexible Contracts: Balancing Client Retention and Revenue Risk - Carlson Choi

Dave Sobel (0:01)

Dave Sobel here, reporting from the floor of Channel Con. I'm sitting down today with Carlson Choi. He is the COO at Slide. Now, Slide's about 18 months old, running about 1,000 partners right now. Carlson, welcome to the show.

Carlson Choi (0:13)

Well, thank you for inviting us. It's exciting to come and catch up and share a little bit of news and what we've been going with at Slide.

Dave Sobel (0:19)

Well, a quick disclosure for everyone, we reported on the Slide v Datto lawsuit going on, actually Datto v Slide. You can catch that investigative reporting, but it's a quick disclosure. Carlson was at Datto prior, so just everyone has a context. Give me a little bit of the context of where Slide is right now. You're 18 months post-launch. What are the measurements, like storage size, partner size? Give me some of those numbers.

Carlson Choi (0:41)

Let's see, 15 months, let me count this. It's been crazy 15 months if you think about it, right? For us, it feels more like 15 years. Why? Because I think the acceleration, the acceptance of the community from us, it's been great.

So, if you could look at the last 15 months, what we have grown to, we went from the dozen of partner who really early pilot with us, to now a thousand plus partner worldwide, which is great things to hear. Other thing we have done now, we're operating with two headquarter offices. We have one in the US, in Westport, Connecticut, and we also have opened an office recently in the UK to really serve our partner in the European region.

We went from one data center to four. I think that's a really important aspect to know because of data residency, but you can't just serve everything out of one single data center, but rather, in where the partners and the client data need to be. From an employee account perspective, we actually have grown and also we went from, I think, a year ago, about 10 that we got started. We're almost at 100 employees, but it's still really maintaining the heavy-duty focus at engineer and product first, and then the rest of the organization. But last but not least, I think for us, we're now been operating all those different data centers with all these partners in place. We're still one single product as we stand, really continue going deeper and making our on-prem solution, the BCDR, becoming what we need for the partners out there today.

Dave Sobel (2:04)

So right now, what's the main thing that a partner could put in production right now that's the lead feature?

Carlson Choi (2:10)

Right now, what they can put in today is our on-prem backup. It's a BCDR product that we have today as we launched about a year ago, well, 15 months ago, we continued to expand on the depth of the product. Right now, we have not only have a lot of capability, including for different agent that we support in Linux, which is a lot of demand from the partner, sharing what they asked for, adding them into places. So as of today, what they have available to them is the BCDR on-prem backup product.

Dave Sobel (2:36)

Okay. Now, in setting this all up, you made the pitch to me that you want to argue against the single plane of glass for the MSP.

This has been kind of the trope for a very long time in the space. Make the case for me against the single plane of glass.

Carlson Choi (2:50)

I think you think about single plane of glass is how you execute it. I would say close to consolidation. You take a look at the world that we have in place, a single plane of glass, what do you know about today? Mostly hearing that single sign-on. Great. I now can sign on the same place. But the moment you go deep in using application, the experience is going to be very different depending how they execute. I'll take an example. You look at a car dealer, they consolidate and purchase multiple different car brands. You might be able to buy the different car brand from one dealership, but ultimately, the end, the operating experience of four different car brands are going to be slightly different.

The development platform are usually not sharing some of the knowledge. But then you take a look at a sign with a software giant like Microsoft. When they do acquisition and consolidation, they actually do it in a really interesting way. I'll take an example of Skype. Skype was acquired 10 plus years ago.

But when they bought it, they didn't just stitch it together by putting a single sign and put duct tape around, oh, now they're one product suite. But rather, they start a new route called Teams.