intend to do the exact same thing with CrowdStrike—take an amazing product and make it consumable for managed service providers who serve SMBs.” Historically, few companies in the IT industry “have been enterprise-first and then committed to come down to the chan- nel, to work with the SMB community,” said Powell, a channel and cybersecurity industry veteran who joined Pax8 in April. Microsoft, of course, is one of them. Now, CrowdStrike is making the right moves to be next, he said: “Their willingness to do this right—not just dabble in it, but to really engage with the channel in the correct way—has been really encouraging.” Even as CrowdStrike looks to unleash an army of new MSP partners, the vendor is also seeking to bolster its work with exist- ing partners, executives said. With the September unveiling of its new channel program,Accel- erate, executives said it’s the biggest update to the CrowdStrike program since it debuted in 2015. As Bernard puts it, Accelerate constitutes a “tectonic shift” in CrowdStrike’s approach to working with partners.The program features expanded discounts and incen- tives, greater resources around support and marketing, reduced response times for deal registration and a refreshed video training series, CrowdClass. CrowdStrike has also launched a new marketing campaign platform for partners, dubbed “the grid,” which includes an array of co-branded sales resources. The platform allows partners to enter in a list of customers or prospects and then generates “up- to-the-minute marketing material,” saidWhite Rock’s Range.“It’s a huge benefit.” ForWhite Rock, the combination of CrowdStrike’s strong tech- nology and partner enablement is leading the solution provider to expect revenue growth of at least 50 percent this year in its CrowdStrike business, Range said. “CrowdStrike has definitely been a home run for us,” he said. Looking ahead, CrowdStrike is aiming to build out its channel- focused routes to market even further, and “we also need to continue to invest and enable our partners,” Kurtz told CRN . “That’s an area that we really want to focus on. We know we can do better there.” Going forward, CrowdStrike will also be doubling down on helping partners to utilize more of the modules now available on its platform, executives said. Emerging Opportunities Whether large or small, most businesses are dealing with the same types of cybersecurity issues right now: too much complexity, not enough expertise, changing threats. Bringing more of CrowdStrike’s capabilities to customers, beyond its core endpoint security technology, can help address all these issues at the same time, solution provider executives said. For starters, many customers are looking to consolidate more of their security tools on a single vendor to reduce complexity and cost, executives said.
Meanwhile, thanks in part to CrowdStrike’s success at stop- ping hackers on endpoints, identity-based attacks that aim to get around endpoint detection are surging. For many businesses, “identity threats are No. 1” right now, said Adam Meyers, head of Counter Adversary Operations at CrowdStrike. In this environment, CrowdStrike reports rapid customer adoption of its identity threat protection and detection capabili- ties—and executives pointed to the modules as a next area for partners to explore. Additional CrowdStrike modules cover cloud workload protec- tion, data security and observability, log management and many more key areas of interest to businesses. Bringing it all together is CrowdStrike’s XDR (extended detec- tion and response) technology, which correlates threat data from across the tools as well as numerous third-party products. New modules can also be added quickly and easily thanks to CrowdStrike’s single-agent, cloud-native architecture, according to executives from CrowdStrike and from solution provider partners. Working with CrowdStrike makes it far easier to have con- versations with customers around consolidating their security tools, said Faisal Abou-Shahla, director of security enablement and sales at Irvine, Calif.-based Trace3, No. 36 on CRN ’s 2023 Solution Provider 500. With CrowdStrike, customers “can get one holistic solution that covers many different areas, and they can add on what they need as they expand and want more coverage in a certain space,” Abou-Shahla said. ‘Better Path Forward’ Along with continuing to add new modules to its platform as threat trends evolve, CrowdStrike is enhancing its platform with generative AI technology, executives said. CrowdStrike recently unveiled Charlotte AI, which the com- pany calls a “generativeAI security analyst” that can dramatically boost productivity and effectiveness for cyber defense teams, according to the company. The tool can “accelerate the human decision-making process, which is critical in cyber,” Sentonas said. Ultimately, whether it’s about displacing existing endpoint security vendors, vying with Microsoft or offering protection against modern threats such as identity-based attacks, Kurtz said that CrowdStrike’s technology platform remains its top advantage, just as it has since the company’s founding in 2011. “We instrument the technology in the Falcon platform in such a way that we get full visibility across the [attack] chain,” he said. Even if no malware is used in an attack, “we’re still going to be able to see and prevent it,” Kurtz said. For partners and customers that are exhausted by today’s threat environment and are looking for a new approach, Kurtz said CrowdStrike has a hopeful message for them: “There’s a better path forward that’s going to provide better prevention at a lower cost to them.”
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OCTOBER 2023
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