Freshworks leans on partner flywheel to unlock mid-market opportunity at scale

As enterprise software companies race to close the gap between product capability and market reach, the distribution scale — a company’s ability to move product through partner networks at volume and velocity — has emerged as the critical engine of growth.

For mid-market software-as-a-service providers, the challenge is not just building a great product — it is getting that product in front of the vast majority of the world’s businesses that larger competitors routinely overlook, according to Kuntal Vahalia (pictured, left), senior vice president of global channels and alliances at Freshworks Inc. That mid-market represents an enormous, underserved opportunity, and the companies that can activate the right partner ecosystem to reach it stand to gain an outsized share of the next wave of enterprise AI adoption. That dynamic is playing out in real time through Freshservice, Freshworks’ IT service management platform, and its growing partner network.

“We have a market fit with the mid-enterprise,” Vahalia said. “If you think about mid-enterprise, that’s 90% of the world’s businesses. It’s a massive [total accessible market] we have. In some ways, the customers and the market are coming to us because there’s such a wide space. There’s not a big offering right now — our competition all works [with the] high-end enterprise.”

Vahalia and Dale Foster (right), chief executive officer of Climb Global Solutions Inc., spoke with theCUBE’s Bob Laliberte at the Freshworks Refresh event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed distribution scale, partner enablement strategy and why Freshworks’ platform makes it an attractive engine for resellers and managed service providers navigating the AI era. (* Disclosure below.)

Distribution scale and the partner flywheel

The distribution scale conversation takes concrete shape with Climb, which has grown its Freshworks-related revenue more than 40% year over year and sells into more than 6,000 resellers, managed service providers and value-added resellers, according to Foster. The appeal is rooted in Freshworks’ breadth — a platform wide enough that partners can land on a single urgent use case and expand from there, comparable to selling the book but delivering a chapter at a time.

“They have a broad portfolio. You could go to their end user customer, they have an existing problem they’re trying to solve,” Foster explained. “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 providers in.”

The distribution scale opportunity is also far from fully realized. Despite strong Americas momentum, the partnership with Climb has yet to expand into Europe — representing a potential doubling of existing business from a single relationship alone, according to Vahalia. The priority for Freshworks is enablement at scale: training channel, system integrator and cloud partners to land deployments, drive adoption, prove validated outcomes and then earn the right to expand.

“Customers’ buying patterns have changed,” Vahalia said. “They’re constantly looking for validated outcomes. 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. We get that flywheel running and that’s where the velocity comes in.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Freshworks Refresh event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Freshworks Refresh event. Neither Freshworks, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE