Technology vendors love to say they listen to their partners. Slide is turning those conversations into a growth strategy.
The backup vendor has expanded rapidly since making its platform broadly available to MSPs in early 2025. It has grown from about a dozen preview partners to more than 1,000, according to COO Carlson Choi. Its workforce has climbed from about 10 employees to nearly 100. Slide also expanded from one data center to four and moved beyond the U.S. into Canada and Europe.
That growth comes as Slide pours more resources into its business. In March 2026, the company announced $70 million in Series B funding to accelerate product development and international expansion. At the time, Slide was approaching 1,000 MSP partners with nearly 4,000 BCDR appliances deployed globally.
But Choi doesn’t attribute the company’s momentum solely to technology, funding or the leadership team’s channel experience. Instead, he points to the company’s willingness to listen to partners and act quickly on what it hears.
“What is really unique for us from a success standpoint is always listening to what the MSPs are saying. Part of why we have such a high velocity of growth is because we hear them, we take their feedback, and we build into the product what they want.”
For MSPs, Slide’s evolution offers more than another backup option to evaluate. It provides a look at what can happen when partner feedback moves beyond surveys and advisory councils and into product development.
Turning MSP feedback into features
Slide has designed its development process around continuous releases. Instead of holding completed features for a major product update, the company releases them as they are ready, Choi explained. That can shorten the distance between an MSP raising a need and seeing a feature designed to address it.
The company also maintains a Discord community for partners and prospects, with members of its development team participating directly. Choi said developers sometimes encounter an MSP request there and respond to it or ask for input on something they are testing.
That access gives MSPs a more direct route to the people building the technology they use. It has also changed how Slide approaches sales, Choi emphasized.
Slide welcomes feedback from its partners and turns it into action.
“It goes back to a product-centric approach. Is this product going to work for you? Is it going to be your product? Because if an MSP says, ‘This is my product,’ they will naturally share with their peer group.”
Choi said he tells Slide’s salespeople that their job isn’t simply to close a deal. They also must find out why a prospective partner isn’t ready to buy. That feedback can reveal what’s missing and help inform future development.
MSP input is helping shape a bigger vision
Feedback is becoming more important as Slide looks beyond its initial BCDR offering.
The company’s longer-term vision is a unified backup platform that can protect data across on-premises servers, endpoints, SaaS applications and cloud workloads. For MSPs, that could address an increasingly familiar problem. A vendor may offer multiple backup capabilities under one umbrella, but managing or searching across those workloads can still require moving between different experiences.
Slide wants to build those capabilities as a unified platform from the ground up rather than assemble them through acquisitions, Choi said. The goal is to make tasks like finding and restoring data work consistently regardless of where that data resides.
It’s an ambition CEO Michael Fass discussed earlier this year following Slide’s Series B funding. Slide had only one product on the market at the time, Choi recalled, but MSPs ultimately need to protect data wherever it lives. The new funding would allow Slide to expand its engineering team and capabilities.
For MSPs evaluating Slide, that means the company they encounter today may look considerably different a few years from now. And that is a good thing.
“What stands out about Slide is the commitment to engaging with partners,” said Michael Failla, vice president of sales for New Jersey MSP SWK Technologies. “The company understands that MSPs are on the front lines with customers, and it actively incorporates that feedback into the platform and strategy. That collaborative approach has fostered a productive and mutually beneficial relationship, positioning both SWK Technologies and Slide to better support our shared customers and drive continued growth.”
Listening is influencing more than the product
Partner demands also are influencing how Slide builds out its organization.
Carlson Choi
Choi pointed to increasing MSP requirements around security and compliance, including CMMC, FIPS and FedRAMP. In response to those needs, Slide has been adding security and technical leadership rather than waiting until the business reaches the point where those roles become urgent.
Anticipating the future needs of MSPs is another part of Slide’s strategy. “MSPs will tell you what they want. Always. That’s what’s great about community. You have to make a decision as management and say, ‘How much do I want to take that in?’”
That’s an important distinction for MSPs assessing vendor relationships. Asking for feedback is easy. Investing in people, development resources and infrastructure based on that feedback is harder, Choi said.
The next test: Listening at scale
Slide now faces a challenge that comes with the growth it has experienced. Keeping a startup mentality gets harder as a business scales.
At a recent companywide meeting, Choi acknowledged that he no longer knew half of the people in the room. As Slide grows, its leaders will have to make a deliberate effort to remain as close to employees as they were when the company consisted largely of a small group of engineers, he said.
That may be the more important metric to watch as Slide enters its next phase. More employees, data centers, funding and partners can help Slide build a broader platform. But those same things also create distance between company leaders, developers and the MSPs they serve.
Slide’s growth is worth watching not simply because another backup vendor is getting bigger. It’s because the company is betting that MSPs themselves can help determine what it becomes.
The next question is whether Slide can keep listening as closely when 1,000 partners become several thousand.
Anjali Fluker is managing editor of The ChannelPro Network, where she covers news, trends and best practices for the MSP community. She specializes in telling the stories that matter to IT providers serving the SMB market. When she’s not reporting on the latest in managed services, she’s connecting with channel pros at industry events across the country.
Images: Anjali Fluker/ChannelPro, Slide
