tion.And when you offer them something better—when you offer them the ability to make the problem go away and not have to deal with the managing, the care and feeding, and the head count—it’s very, very compelling. So it’s still in the early innings, but it’s such a massive market that I think it will drive growth for many years to come. Specific to the partner network, bringing on Daniel Bernard [as chief business officer] and really focusing on this SMB space, creating relationships with companies like Pax8 … this has really been game-changing for us to be able to get into the SMB partner ecosystem and have success there. What makes the Pax8 partnership so critical to your SMB strategy? You can’t go to every little managed service provider out there. [Pax8 has] access to 30,000 managed service providers that have relationships in the SMB market.And when you add it all up, it’s the law of large numbers—a lot of little numbers add up pretty quick.And that has been, I think, a tremendous path for us to get to these smaller SMBs—and obviously, smaller managed service provider channel partners that we simply couldn’t [reach] on our own. Has Falcon Go been another key piece of the puzzle in terms of reaching SMBs? Yes, which we didn’t have when we started the company. So we’ve been able to take world-leading technology and pack- age it up in a way that makes it super easy for a customer to buy and to consume, and for partners to be able to leverage that and sell that into their customer base. It doesn’t have every bell and whistle of the full enterprise product, which you would expect, but the core elements of what’s needed in terms of prevention and visibility are there. So Falcon Go has been a great addition. What are your other major areas of investment in partners right now? From resellers to cloud providers to managed service pro- viders to PC OEMs—there’s an opportunity for all of these various partners to be successful with CrowdStrike. And we’re investing in it. And you can see the investment with [Bernard] being able to create a separate organization, out- side the sales organization. Most sales organizations are focused on making their number every 90 days. So the fact that we’ve been able to move this into a separate group, run by [Bernard], and make the investments that we’re making from both a time and dollar perspective I think is really important for partners.We can’t be successful if they’re not, and we need to continue to build out these routes to mar- ket now.We also need to continue to invest and enable our
partners. And I think that’s an area that we really want to focus on.
Beyond SMB, what are the other major opportunities for your partners in working with CrowdStrike right now? We need to empower [partners] and make sure they know about a lot of the other modules and can sell the other modules above and beyond the core endpoint protection technologies that everybody knows us for. Identity has been just tremendous, in terms of the adoption—one of the fastest- growing modules we’ve ever introduced.We’ve got LogScale [for] SIEM [security information and event management], which is growing like a weed. [On] cloud protection, we’ve really harmonized cloud workload protection with CSPM [cloud security posture management]. It’s very easy now for customers to consume that. We’ve had tremendous success in those areas. So those are the growth areas that we want to continue to work with. What are your goals right now for expanding more broadly within the IT space, such as into areas like observability? That’s something we’re continuing to look at in a lot of fine detail. What we found is that with customers who use our technology [for cybersecurity], what happens over time is that the IT teams get wind of this technology and start to ask a few questions.And many times it’s like, ‘I didn’t realize that Falcon can actually do that.’ To give you a good example, in COVID, when everyone had their systems at home, the IT teams were scrambling on how they were going to update the systems and how they were going to reset the passwords.And they were actually using the Falcon technology to adminis- ter the systems. So what we found over time is that the IT teams have been wanting more and more of CrowdStrike. They want more visibility into the assets, they want more control. They want the ability to drive automation beyond just security tasks. And security is a big market, but IT has an even bigger budget. We’re $100 billion-plus just in securityTAM [total address- able market]. If you add IT as a new pool of dollars, it’s massive. So we think that’s really compelling.And we think the ability to leverage this agent is really valuable beach- front that we have. Customers want to do more with less. They want less agents. We’ve got the most efficient and capable agent out there—it just happens to be that we deliver security through it. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t deliver other IT outcomes using our technology.
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OCTOBER 2023
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