This discussion at Refresh 2026 in Hudson Yards New York City examines partner-led transformation and artificial intelligence enabled service delivery, with emphasis on Freshworks product announcements, partner enablement and go-to-market momentum. The session highlights unified platform strategy, AI-enabled workflows, distribution and reseller enablement, and outcomes-driven adoption.
Kuntal Vahalia of Freshworks is senior vice president, global channels and alliances. Dale Foster of Climb is chief executive officer. Bob Laliberte of theCUBE Research is principal analyst and hosts the conversation.
Vahalia outlines partner-led scale and mid-market product fit and describes Freshworks' unified platform and bring-your-own-AI agent approach as enabling land and expand motions and scaled partner enablement. They emphasize partner training, certification and aligned incentives to accelerate adoption. Foster highlights distribution strategies and reseller enablement that reduce complexity and accelerate time to value for customers and managed service providers, MSPs. They focus on practical deployment patterns and go-to-market velocity. Laliberte underscores validated outcomes and partner enablement as primary drivers for adoption and renewal. They guide the discussion toward measurable business impact and ecosystem alignment.
Key takeaways include Freshworks' unified platform and bring-your-own-AI agent approach, partner-led routes to market that enable land and expand, distributor and reseller solutions that minimize complexity and accelerate time to value, and the importance of validated outcomes for adoption and renewal. These elements drive SaaS growth, channel partner momentum and improved customer experience.
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Kuntal Vahalia, Freshworks & Dale Foster, Climb
This discussion at Refresh 2026 in Hudson Yards New York City examines partner-led transformation and artificial intelligence enabled service delivery, with emphasis on Freshworks product announcements, partner enablement and go-to-market momentum. The session highlights unified platform strategy, AI-enabled workflows, distribution and reseller enablement, and outcomes-driven adoption.
Kuntal Vahalia of Freshworks is senior vice president, global channels and alliances. Dale Foster of Climb is chief executive officer. Bob Laliberte of theCUBE Research is principal analyst and hosts the conversation.
Vahalia outlines partner-led scale and mid-market product fit and describes Freshworks' unified platform and bring-your-own-AI agent approach as enabling land and expand motions and scaled partner enablement. They emphasize partner training, certification and aligned incentives to accelerate adoption. Foster highlights distribution strategies and reseller enablement that reduce complexity and accelerate time to value for customers and managed service providers, MSPs. They focus on practical deployment patterns and go-to-market velocity. Laliberte underscores validated outcomes and partner enablement as primary drivers for adoption and renewal. They guide the discussion toward measurable business impact and ecosystem alignment.
Key takeaways include Freshworks' unified platform and bring-your-own-AI agent approach, partner-led routes to market that enable land and expand, distributor and reseller solutions that minimize complexity and accelerate time to value, and the importance of validated outcomes for adoption and renewal. These elements drive SaaS growth, channel partner momentum and improved customer experience.
In this interview from Freshworks Refresh 2026, Kuntal Vahalia, senior vice president of partner and alliances at Freshworks, joins Dale Foster, chief executive officer of Climb Global Solutions, to talk with theCUBE Research's Bob Laliberte about how a partner-led ecosystem strategy is driving AI-powered service transformation across mid-market enterprises. Vahalia, five weeks into the role, outlines what drew him to Freshworks: a clear mid-market focus spanning 90% of the world's businesses, a partner ecosystem built to win multiple ways and a scale traject...Read more
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Can you describe Climb, your partnership with Freshworks, your go-to-market approach, and whether you use Freshworks' products internally?add
What makes Freshworks an attractive vendor/partner for resellers and MSPs?add
How does Freshworks enable partners to help customers address modern IT challenges?add
>> Welcome to Refresh 2026 at Hudson Yards in New York City. I'm Bob Laliberte, principal analyst with theCUBE Research. I'm here today with Kuntal Vahalia, Senior Vice President Global Channels and Alliances of Freshworks and also Dale Foster, CEO of Climb. Welcome, Dale. Welcome, Kuntal.
Kuntal Vahalia
>> Thank you.
Bob Laliberte
>> Excellent. Welcome. Yeah, great to have you here. Let's get started with you, Kuntal. I noticed that you just recently joined Freshworks. So I'm wondering if you could explain maybe what attracted you to Freshworks and what's the opportunity that you saw in the market?
Kuntal Vahalia
>> Yeah. Well, thank you. First thing, thank you for being here. We are all excited to be here at Refresh with our customers and partners. It's my first Refresh. I've learned a lot. I've met a lot of new people. The energy is amazing. I'm fresh in Freshworks. I've been here only for five weeks, still learning my ropes here, but I spent a bunch of time really studying the opportunity of the company. And I think there are three things I would say that brought me to Freshworks. First is, the more I spoke to our CRO, CEO, and the board, there's a very clear strategy. We have a market fit with the mid-enterprise and if you think about mid-enterprise, that's 90% of the world's businesses.
Bob Laliberte
>> Correct.
Kuntal Vahalia
>> It's a massive dam that we have. In some ways, the customers and the market is coming to us because there's such a wide space. There's not a big offering right now. Our competition all works in the high-end enterprise. So there are not enough players out here in the mid-market. So we have a clear strategy. We are winning. We saw our earnings. We found a market fit. We continue to innovate on our product. The second aspect was just being a partner leader. The question I'll always ask is, A, is there enough money for our partners in this ecosystem? And the answer was yes. B, are there multiple ways to win for our partners? And I always drive analogy to sports teams, the great dynasties, the great championship teams. They are champions because they can win multiple ways. And I always want to build an ecosystem which can win in multiple ways. And I saw that here. We have a channel partner in Climb here who has done exceedingly well growing upwards of 40% year-over-year with us. We have SIs, we have cloud partners. There's so many different ways to win here. Third, I've done a lot of businesses where I've scaled: Salesforce, MuleSoft, Anaplan. To me, this presented that scale opportunity. I felt excited to play a small part in that along with our partners.
Bob Laliberte
>> You articulated it very well and it seems like there is a great opportunity here. Dale, I'd like to turn to you as well and maybe have you tell us a little bit about Climb and the momentum that you're seeing in the market as well.
Dale Foster
>> Yeah. So Dale Foster, CEO of Climb. We are a distributor of software application products. Freshworks being one of our primary products we take to market. We sell to over 6,000 resellers, MSPs and bars throughout the US and Western Europe. We are partners with Freshworks on the NASDAQ. So we both are NASDAQ-listed companies. And our go-to-market is really speed. How fast and how many eyeballs can we get on a product like Freshworks and their portfolio as quickly as possible to our customers and then to end users.
Bob Laliberte
>> Got it. And I understand you drink your own champagne as well. You're not only a distributor, but you also use Freshworks internally.
Dale Foster
>> We do. Full disclosure, we have some of the products inside of Climb that we're using now in certain aspects. And as we saw today, and this goes to how broad their portfolio is, that you can just land and expand. We'll start in certain subsets of our ecosystem and our IT infrastructure and we'll just keep expanding from there. So very good and good for our partners as well.
Bob Laliberte
>> Okay. No, that's great. I wanted to follow up with that. Since you're here today as both a distributor and also a customer, what really stood out to you about the announcements? There are a number of innovations that they launched today, which I found pretty impressive. I'm wondering what you noticed .
Dale Foster
>> Yeah, two things. The first is the unified platform. And I've been in this market a long time and the first thing we always say is, "Hey, can we get a single pane of glass?" That was announced today. Everybody says it. Freshworks is doing that. I think that's important. The other piece of it that was new for me was, yeah, everybody's using AI, but Freshworks is saying, "Hey, you can bring your own AI agents into this and you can work it with our own internal AI agents." So a customer, their AI journey might be a little different, Freshworks is saying, "Hey, this is what we can use in conjunction. Our agents can work with each other. Our agents can talk to each other." I thought that was very impactful.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, certainly that MCP capability is going to be big as more and more of the agentic AI takes hold and workflows are automated and so forth. Let me ask you this, the people that you're selling to, how do they think about all these AI opportunities?
Dale Foster
>> My background is selling. I'll talk from my sales teams going into the different resellers and MSPs that are out there. And here's what's attractive about Freshworks, they have a broad portfolio. They talk about bringing it together under a platform, but they go very broad. You could go into their end user customer, they have an existing problem they're trying to solve. So Freshworks, they say, "Hey, this is perfect for this." Once you're in there, they don't have to go in to bring other products in or other vendors in and say, "Hey, wait a second. We can go..."
And even with the Device42 that has been an excellent piece for the asset management piece, they can take that into and saying, "Hey, we are going extremely wide." And Freshworks, I know they have a lot of products on the roadmap that are going to keep them going wider. I think it's great. It's good for sales teams that have so many vendors coming at us. And we try to keep our portfolio to less than 70 vendors. A lot of our competitors are in the thousands. We love to continue to shrink that down. Freshworks makes sense because it goes wide with this.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I always refer to that as being able to sell the book, but delivering a chapter at a time, being able to go in, solve a critical problem, and then be able to expand. So great opportunity for your resellers and your MSPs.
Dale Foster
>> It is.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely. Kuntal, I want to go back to you as well and maybe see from a partner-led transformation, I know that service transformation is a big topic here today. How does Freshworks enable partners to help customers address some of these modern IT challenges?
Kuntal Vahalia
>> Yeah. You heard all the announcements, there's unified platforms, service transformation. We want to really drive critical outcomes for employee experience, customer service experience. There's a lot we want to go deliver for our customers and we want to deliver through our partners, which means our commitment back to our partners is enablement. One of the things that we like about our journey is we can land anywhere on this Unified platform and then expand out. We can expand north-west, east-west, north-south, you name it. So we want to go teach our partners how to go sell, how to go deliver, how to go drive adoption for our customers, drive renewal, and then find use case number two, three, four, five. So we have our commitment back to our channel partners, our SI partners, our cloud partners around full enablement to support the customer life cycle. And we are doing that through hands-on exercises. We are doing through events like this, we are doing through e-learning, but that is our top priority. That is the currency we believe in, that's the currency I believe in as a partner leader, and that's our top commitment to go deliver enablement at scale to our partners.
Bob Laliberte
>> And I thought there was a lot of good examples in the keynote of that enablement for the customers, that accelerated time to value, whether it's rapid deployment and adoption, whether it's the comments I heard multiple time or intuitive use. Those are all things that are really going to help accelerate that time to value for organizations using the platform.
Kuntal Vahalia
>> And customers' buying patterns have changed. They're constantly looking for validated outcomes. They're like, "Hey, did we have outcomes? Can we validate them with the true ROIs?" And I think that's the beauty about this company. Enterprise software has always been there, but it's always been hard. There are very few who can do it. Freshworks is one of them. Our partners are able to go drive validated outcomes for our customers, which earns us the right to go back and get the second, third, fourth use case. And we get that flywheel running and that's where the velocity comes in. And again, enablement is the key there.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely. Dale, I want to go back to you. There's been a lot of discussions lately around SaaS disruption, AI transformation. How are you helping your resellers and MSPs navigate through that?
Dale Foster
>> Yeah. First, I think it's way overblown. I have to say that we have a lot of SaaS products on our portfolio and I look at it this way and then I have to go back to our tech guys and talk to the really smart guys. AI is great. We're all using it. We're all deciding what our journey's going to look like. And back to what you said before as far as the outcomes on that and when we talk about XLAs versus SLAs, I think that's the actual outcome and I'm part of that. But I look at it from how complex a solution and how complex the problem is to solve. And AI does a great job for repetitive to being used for going and searching and finding things, but it's repetitive. When it's something very complex and after watching today how complex Freshworks goes across their entire portfolio, AI doesn't do that. You're not going to go and build agents to make all this up and spend all that time. Maybe an enterprise will, but the rest of us are like, "Hey, no, we need products like this." So we think it's overblown. We need products like Freshworks. And the amount of internal AI that they're using, it only makes their products better and faster.
Bob Laliberte
>> That makes a lot of sense. Kuntal, just to wrap things up here, I wonder if you could talk about how you see Freshworks scaling its global partner strategy. I know you talked a little bit at the beginning about why you came here. I wonder if you could bring it home now and maybe make a pitch for why organizations would want to partner with Freshworks as well.
Kuntal Vahalia
>> Well, we are still in early innings, but we barely scratched the surface. Just talk about Climb, and Dale and I were talking, we built a great American business. We haven't even gone to Europe. And we can do more, just this one partner. In America, we could go double this in the next couple of years and then we can go double this internationally. In terms of scaling, listen, we are going up market. That opens up a new segment of partners. We definitely want a little bit more system integrators to come in and really handhold a customer through their journey with us. So I think there's a time and pace for that. We do not have great SI presence in our portfolio today, but we're going to go add it. Channel partners, again, Climb, there's just so much more to do. That itself is a multi-X growth there. And then we got to go bring the rest of the ecosystem around cloud partners, data partners, ISVs. Again, that's a story to be told. So we're going to go scale this multiple ways, not to say we're going to go boil our ocean. We're going to do more with less number of partners, but we're going to go add very meaningful ways for us to go win more and scale this ecosystem.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, that sounds like a great plan. Certainly, if any of your partners are out there now, great opportunity to reach out to Freshworks, to reach out to Climb, and investigate what opportunities may exist for them to deliver the solutions that you guys have been talking about today.
Dale Foster
>> Very good.
Bob Laliberte
>> Absolutely.
Kuntal Vahalia
>> Excellent.
Bob Laliberte
>> Well, hey, I want to thank both of you for being here. Partnerships continue to be really critical as enterprises operationalize AI and transform their service delivery. So thank you both for joining me.
Kuntal Vahalia
>> Yeah. Thank you.
Dale Foster
>> Thank you, Bob.
Bob Laliberte
>> Thank you. Absolutely. And thank all of you for watching. Stay tuned for more great content from Refresh 2026.
Bob Laliberte