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they way they did business. “After hearing that enough times, the juices started flowing for us, and we were inspired to set up our own company,” he says. “It was more a sense of obligation. We owe all our success to the MSP community and felt a debt of gratitude to them and the incredible staff that helped build such a virtuous cycle of positivity. “Hearing the din that we did during the year following the sale inspired us to think about how to bring back the magic. That also coincided with a technology revolution that afforded us the opportunity to grab five of the best engineers, all of whom had left their old company. We asked them if they'd be interested in building a next-generation backup company starting with a BCDR product. “We said we’d give them all the resources, people and time they needed, just go ahead and build next generation products for MSP businesses. And that's gosh darn what we did.” Expansion Slide has expanded quickly since the company first launched in Michael’s native USA in 2024. “We wanted to make sure that we could deliver the kind of value that we wanted to MSPs before we branched out,” he says. “It took us about six months to get comfortable. We then launched in Canada last summer, and we launched in EMEA earlier this year. We have lots of partners that live in other parts of the world, and I'm sure we'll be landing on their beaches soon too.” As part of the EMEA expansion, Slide recently opened an office in Maidenhead. “It’s right next to the train station, a 30-minute ride from downtown London, its perfect,” says Michael. “We have friendly faces there from the old days.” Slide also has a data centre up and running in Frankfurt, with a UK one in development, which is in response to UK partners' data sovereignty requirements.
Growth potential As Michael has hinted, his ambitions for Slide are just beginning. “In the short- term, we want to be wherever MSPs are,” he says. “It's incredibly important to respect your partner and your customer. So how do I develop empathy for my partner without being where they reside and where they work. So, with a great deal of humility, we will meet with our friends in MSPland and demonstrate the value of our systems, particularly in the backup and BCDR spaces. We hope that we'll continue to see the same kind of growth over here as we've seen in North America.” Michael is confident about the future for Slide and the MSP community. “I believe the MSP community are unsung heroes,” he says. “They are the only true delivery mechanism for IT to SMBs. As complexity abounds and cybersecurity risks increase with AI, the MSP becomes an increasingly key element of SMBs. “MSPs that are riding the front edge of that wave are going to be successful. Some MSPs are not going to catch the wave and will be consolidated or left behind. So though there will be winners and losers in the SMB MSP channel, as there always has been, the concentration of need for MSPs continues to rise. As a result, we're seeing huge demand for our products and will continue to.” n
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I believe the MSP community are unsung heroes... ...They are the only true delivery mechanism for IT to SMBs.
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