Plugable CEO Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy on bringing Amazon-tested peripherals to the IT channel and introducing modular AI hardware

ROBERT DUTT: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Today, we’re talking about the desktop edge and how a brand born on Amazon is making waves in the IT channel. My guest is Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy, the chief executive officer of Plugable. Many of you will recognize Lynn from her deep roots here in the Canadian channel, including her time leading Westcon Canada. She joined Plugable a few years ago to help them transition from a prosumer favourite to a serious B2B player. We discuss why their trial by fire in the consumer review space actually makes their docking stations and peripherals perfect for MSPs looking to reduce help desk tickets in mixed hardware environments. We also dig into their recent investment from Acer Gadget and get a really exciting scoop on a new Thunderbolt 5 AI enclosure that gives partners a modular way to deploy serious local AI processing power.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy.

ROBERT DUTT: Tim, thanks for taking the time. It’s great to talk to you again.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, it’s great to talk to you again as well. It’s been many years, we were just establishing.

ROBERT DUTT: It has been a while, probably more than either of us would like to admit, but such is.

A lot of our listeners will obviously know you from your time leading Westcon Canada and then your work at StarTech.com after that. Can you kind of walk us through your journey from the distribution side of the house to where you are now at the helm of Plugable?

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, actually it’s been interesting because I started out at a service provider and then I spent many years at Westcon, and then I went to a vendor brand, which is where I’m at now as well. So you kind of get this 360-degree view of the channel and it’s been really interesting. I’ve been very fortunate. So about five years ago, I joined Plugable as the CEO and we’ve been undergoing a whole transformation. I mean, I can go into it if you want now, a little bit about why I joined the company, but I don’t want to jump on any questions you have.

ROBERT DUTT: No, I appreciate that. And yeah, this would be a great time to do that. What did you see there? And I guess especially… yeah, let’s just start there.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah. So Plugable was known, and some of the channel partners do think of us as an Amazon seller. But what I loved about the… I mean, we were watching them closely because we were always competing with them when I was at StarTech.com. But what they really are is a data company, an e-commerce company, and they were founded on Amazon. So I saw this digital native that suddenly was showing up in the channel and the channel was asking for the Plugable products and I was like, what’s going on there? And I was very interested. And as I was talking to the founder, he really wanted to expand. We had this… what was happening was the Chinese factory brands were beginning to show up on Amazon and, I mean, they’re fine products, but the solutions are extremely broad compatibility for business.

So suddenly I started noticing a lot of business in our point of sale and we invested in a whole channel team and we wanted to grow to this omnichannel wherever the business customers buy. And so I found it a very interesting business model. And I think that kind of leads to where we are today. It was sort of demand from the channel side of things.

ROBERT DUTT: Interesting, because I was curious what kind of drove the strategic decision to go from the kind of direct-to-consumer and prosumer Amazon-centric brand to the sort of formalizing and B2B IT channel and making that kind of the bread and butter, it seems.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah. I mean, there were these factors that were happening. As I mentioned, there was disruption in the B2C side and then suddenly businesses are looking at the solution. And I think what interested me the most is the channel has a very broad portfolio that they’re responsible for with the customer. They can’t be master of every brand. And so they want, specifically in peripherals, they want something that they know will work and it’s easy to figure out what the compatibility is.

So you had these two things coming together at the same time. And this company had to be built and survive and thrive with customers never talking to a customer yet selling something fairly complicated. So they had to do it all digitally. And that’s where I found… I think the channel was being asked for us initially because customers were doing online research, right? The B2B buyer’s journey is changing. And so they were asking for us and that’s kind of how it all began.

ROBERT DUTT: How do you take that digital-only or digital-first kind of culture in terms of marketing, in terms of… well, there isn’t really so much enablement, but documentation support for customers… and turn that into channel enablement and all the stuff that one has to do when one’s working through the VAR or MSP channel?

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, great question. So there’s a team of us that came over that had spent our career in the channel. So we knew what the channel required from a channel program, channel support. And so we started with distribution and made sure that we were in the right distribution partners and that we had our inventory available and that we were listed properly. And then we were supporting the channel. They knew how to reach us. And so it’s been that journey, and marketing programs and events, doing all that.

And now, as the whole modern desk is becoming disrupted again, and so much more is being expected of it, things are becoming more complicated. It was time for us to hire a field team. And that field team can help generate leads for the channel, but also can help support the customers. That’s where we are today. We’re on this multi-year journey of transforming to a B2B company, which now the majority of our business is through the channel, which now we are all-channel as well. I consider Amazon a channel. We don’t take any share of the world.

ROBERT DUTT: Especially with that talent in place and that muscle motion in place now, how do you address some of the classic partner concerns that I’m sure have come up? Deal reg, margin protection, MDF, especially when Amazon is part of the channel, but it is also a visible competitor to a lot of the folks who are in the VAR/MSP space.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Oh, great question. And it’s interesting, the channel partners ask us that every time they see us. And we do a little test. We say, let’s go online right now and let’s look at Amazon and several partners’ listings. And I challenge you to find where there’s a different price, where the channel is at a disadvantage. And it’s because we came from an Amazon partner to a channel partner, we have really good control over our pricing. So that’s number one.

And then we were able to build a channel pricing strategy and promotion that we knew, coming from the channel, we knew would work. And so we’ve got a multi-tier channel program. We’re able to do volume opportunities, jam programs, and deal reg, all of that.

ROBERT DUTT: You sat in the distributor’s chair for a long time. And as you point out, you were on the partner side for a while before that. How does that background inform the way you operate a vendor today? What kind of distribution and partner lessons, as well as the overall insights that you mentioned bringing in with the team, does that kind of background in distribution apply to how Plugable goes to market today?

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: That’s a great question. Some of it might just be muscle memory, but I think I understand what makes both the service provider MSP and the distributor tick. And so I think we’re trying to make sure that we’re a really good partner to both of those constituents and try to deliver what they need and work with them in the way that they want. Even if you’re making price changes, for example, with the distributor, you know to do that at a timing that works with them. So we’re trying to be easy to work with.

ROBERT DUTT: Price changes in a timely fashion in 2026 might be a little bit of a different discussion than it was a few years ago, but…

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Well, we went through the pandemic and that was kind of chaotic times. And we’re entering into a whole new chaotic time, really driven by AI. But anyway, you were asking about price changes.

ROBERT DUTT: No, I was just making the observation that it’s certainly a different beast this year as a result of AI and RAMageddon and all that fun stuff that’s going on.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I was just… our founder and chief technology officer is over in Asia. He’s been over there for quite a while and it’s evolving. It’s an evolving story, but there are component level shortages that are beginning to rear, even more than I think people understood, and more than just the memory. So it’s where the pandemic we knew was going to end. We knew that it was a peak and valley and the demand and the constraint, but this is going to be sustained, at least for the foreseeable future.

ROBERT DUTT: Grab your helmet, folks.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: That’s right. Fasten your seatbelt.

ROBERT DUTT: A lot of folks in the solution provider community and MSPs are hyper-focused on SaaS, on cybersecurity, on cloud, on AI. Sometimes I think they think of peripherals as an afterthought, something that gets tacked on there. Why should they be paying more attention to this space? What are the opportunities or where are the margin dollars that they might not realize they’re leaving on the table in a deal if they’re not thinking about the kind of stuff that you guys are bringing to market?

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, that’s a great question because, I mean, let’s face it, peripherals are not that sexy until somebody really realizes they need them. So you’ve got a few things happening, right? The modern desk is being disrupted, as we mentioned, by AI, but also by the demand for productivity. People are using more applications than ever, so they need multi-screens. So just at the very core, you get a new laptop because you had to upgrade it for AI or just for Windows 11. Now you need new peripherals. But those are also… you’re adding more devices, more screen space. And that screen is probably running… one of them is probably running AI. And so the modern desk could be anywhere. It could be hybrid, in a hybrid environment in terms of work.

And then every office you go into, I defy you to find one that is 100% one brand, one GPU, one set of devices that you have to connect to. So let’s just assume that 95% of the environments are hybrid in some way. That’s what third-party docking station companies like ours do best. We work in a mixed environment because we have to work and test deeply for compatibility. Where if you’re buying the bundle, the OEM plus the OEM dock, that’s great for that particular one use. But if you’re in a hybrid environment, you’re plugging in different devices, is it going to work? Are you going to lose productivity? Are you going to have a poor customer experience?

So there’s a lot of demand and complexity that’s being added to the modern desk. And the IT department, they don’t have the capacity to deal with that. They don’t have the time or the capacity. And so we also take those calls from the channel, we take the calls from the end user. “Doesn’t work?” We take them locally.

ROBERT DUTT: I think that points out an interesting side of things that I hadn’t really thought of. My first thought is kind of as an upsell opportunity for a partner who’s selling a solution, selling hardware, tag on the peripherals to build a total deal size and hopefully raise TCO as well. But it sounds like you’re saying there’s an opportunity to potentially, if done right, offload some of the inevitable help desk tickets that come with, “My monitor won’t turn on,” or, “Well, when I’m plugged into this thing, it feels like my data transfer is slower than it is, even though it’s the same kind of connector.” Well, no, it’s not. It’s actually USB. It’s all USB-C, but that one, you’re used to Thunderbolt 3 or 4, and this is something lower. So it sounds like there’s a cost reduction opportunity there too.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah. I mean, as a business leader, I also had to pay for help desks in my P&L. And so I can attest to the fact that I’ve got those people busy trying to do rollouts or IT upgrades, or I don’t want them working on these little minor things, but I also don’t want my staff not being able to get connected. And there are stats that say people lose five, seven minutes every time they try to connect to a meeting, especially if they’re running in. So yes, I’m talking the productivity and user experience and cost savings, but also you mentioned the channel margin. And we do offer a higher margin. That’s something that if the channel partner is not thinking about the margin opportunity by just adding peripherals. And then when you add third-party peripherals…

ROBERT DUTT: Let’s talk about the current situation, the recent investment from Acer Gadget. Tell me a bit about how that partnership came about and what does it mean for you guys in terms of R&D and roadmap and where things go.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, that’s great. We were so excited. Both parties just really are so complimentary. They’re global. They’ve got a global footprint. They’ve got brand halo that we really were pleased to partner with. And then supply chain stability, opportunity to access even a broader supply chain. And for Acer Gadget and Acer, we represent an agnostic, highly compatible device that could work in their environments, as well as a B2B and an e-commerce company and innovation.

Some of the innovation that we’re doing, they really appreciated, specifically around the Thunderbolt 5 AI enclosure and some of that innovation. So we consider it more of a strategic partnership than we do a finance partnership. Although there is benefit there as well, which helped fund the field team that we’re announcing that we’ve hired. That’s for an example.

ROBERT DUTT: It sounds like you say Acer values the agnosticism, as you describe it. That sounds like Plugable remains and the strategy is to remain pretty strictly vendor-neutral when it comes to docking and connectivity.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Absolutely. They would like the brand to remain agnostic.

ROBERT DUTT: You already mentioned the AI enclosure. You mentioned how AI is changing the desktop. How are you guys thinking about where AI is at now and where it’s going in the future in terms of what it means for what you do and where you see Plugable?

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, again, I think the modern desk is completely being disrupted and there’s so much more demand on it. AI PCs right now don’t have the power to run local models. What we’re seeing is in the cloud, there’s billions of dollars being spent on AI in the cloud and there’s going to be a lot of use case for that. But as we move to privacy, and privacy almost seems like it’s a little bit secondary right now. People are racing to leverage AI, but at some point there’s going to be big news. People will focus a little bit more on the privacy piece and what needs to stay local.

You’ve got the capability of the hardware getting better and the GPUs being able to manage more, but also the models. The models are becoming more optimized. At some point, you’re going to have this come together where local is going to be a real option for people. It’s somewhere between now and 18, 24 months, it’s going to become more mainstream where there’s going to be repeatable or local workflows that need to be local. It could be because of token usage, it could be just because of privacy, but it’s going to be there.

We wanted to get ahead of it. We’ve been on the bleeding edge of AI for our own company and we’ve got a really interesting roadmap, but the first launch was our Thunderbolt enclosure where we offered two solutions. One was the one for developers where you build your own local AI, and then we built an enterprise version where it’s intended to be plug-and-play AI. We’ve got a whole software stack and we wrote a chat harness. People in the channel can adopt this to drive a use case for AI and maybe give themselves an opportunity to have a seat at the table for the broader AI spend because use cases right now are where we’re not seeing successful proof of concepts.

ROBERT DUTT: I guess from a peripheral point of view, it’s become an accepted and normal thing for docking to potentially include storage on board or directly connected. Why not have some processing as well and get into that AI boost? Then hopefully, I’m guessing the logic is I can have a less beefy machine hooked up to that and still get the better AI outcomes.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: That’s right. It works today with the Windows PC that you have where, if you were going with… first off, it’s 50 times more powerful than an AI PC. It depends what you’re trying to run. You can chat on an AI PC. You can’t run models. If you wanted to buy then a local solution like a DGX Spark, for example. Those are nice. They’re all built in one, but you have to use Linux. So you’ve got to add another operating system and it’s not modular.

I know a lot of companies are trying to figure out when and how they get in and they don’t want to spend and then not be viable in the next couple of years. So ours is a modular solution. It works with the PC you have. It depends on the use case, what you’re trying to do.

ROBERT DUTT: Given your roots, I have to ask about the distribution strategy in Canada. You said one of the first steps was to lock down what you want to do in distribution. Where are you at in Canada today and how are you approaching getting products into the hands of Canadian partners and getting in front of them and letting them know what you guys are up to?

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Being here in Canada, we have about a third of our company population is Canadian. We’re nicely straddling North America as a North American company. So right now we’re in Ingram and we’re in the works of launching another distributor and we’re expanding our channel here. As part of our expanding a new field team, we also expanded our channel team.

ROBERT DUTT: What is the end… I imagine given what you said it’s probably a pretty broad array, but what does the ideal Plugable partner look like? What are some of the common threads for a successful partner for you?

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Well, it’s changing with the AI solution because with the AI solution, it’s got to be a partner probably within the Global 1000 that has an AI consulting development already because the beauty of that is it needs a channel partner to hook up all the data through MCP. They’ve got to integrate it and support it. But most of our partners are traditional partners. If you name one, we’re probably being sold by them.

We initially started out where partners that had more of an e-commerce play, we were doing very well there, and then it’s just continued to expand.

ROBERT DUTT: Last one for me. You’ve touched on this a little bit with the AI side of things, but what are the main priorities for Plugable over the next 12 to 18 months in terms of both building the market and the product roadmap? And I guess finally, your message to Canadian partners who might be hearing about Plugable for the first time?

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Ah, let’s unpack that. So what’s on the roadmap? Well, with this partnership with Acer Gadget and Acer, we will be expanding our product line. In the past we had to kind of choose an either-or and we spent a lot of time on innovation last year. Well, now we can do both. And so we’re going to be launching more new products this year than we have in a while. So we’re pretty excited about that. We want to continue to expand our footprint globally and we now have a path to do that faster. So basically they’re enabling us to accelerate our strategy.

And then if I were a Canadian partner, what’s Plugable? I think what we’re told by the channel partners we work with is that A, we bring in more new business than most of our competitors because we’re being asked for by their customer. And B, we have the lowest return rate because it just works. And I really believe that that’s our digital native being born on Amazon. You live and die by your reviews. And if you don’t have this whole cycle process of taking the feedback, improving, improving, re-spinning and making sure that you’re listening to the customer’s user experience feedback and improving it, you’re not going to do well. So we bring that to a business-grade solution. So I think we’re low friction for a partner.

ROBERT DUTT: Fascinating, especially fascinating as things continue to develop in terms of what you’re able to add to the PC as AI models get closer to the machine. Lynn, fascinating catching up and good luck with Plugable.

LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Thank you so much. It’s been great to catch up.

ROBERT DUTT: There you have it, Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy from Plugable. I’d like to thank Lynn for her time. And as always, thank you for listening.

It’s fascinating to hear how a company weaponizes its Amazon background. Usually the consumer origin is something vendors tend to try to hide when they pivot to the channel, but Lynn makes a compelling case that surviving the consumer review gauntlet creates exactly the kind of bulletproof hardware that MSPs need. And that Thunderbolt 5 AI enclosure is definitely something to keep an eye on as we all try to figure out the hardware realities of this AI wave.

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Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel. Bye.