CrowdStrike beat expectations during its latest quarter even amid challenging conditions with the help of channel partners, CrowdStrike Co-founder and CEO George Kurtz said Tuesday.
Kurtz made the comments during the cybersecurity giant’s quarterly call with analysts, during which the CrowdStrike CEO focused heavily on the shift toward tool consolidation. The company has been seeing a major move toward consolidating on its unified Falcon security platform, Kurtz said, both in response to the market trends and the growing set of product categories covered by CrowdStrike.
[Related: 5 Big Things To Know From CrowdStrike’s 2024 Threat Report]
Notably, MSSPs and other channel partners have been at the center of much of the consolidation activity on the Falcon platform, Kurtz said.
“Partners are a key driver of market consolidation — both representing our technology to their end customers and also consolidating their efforts away from [other] vendors” with more limited functionality, he said during the call.
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Kurtz also called MSSPs “one of our fastest-growing segments” and said that MSSP partners are “coming to us to migrate their customers off legacy and substandard point products as well as multi-platform vendors.”
“In our channel ecosystem at large, we’re seeing partners deprioritizing other vendors on their line cards to consolidate their time, headcount and go-to-market focus on CrowdStrike,” he said.
For the first quarter of CrowdStrike’s fiscal 2025, ended April 30, the company reported that revenue grew 33 percent from the prior year, reaching $921 million. That surpassed the consensus estimate of Wall Street analysts for the quarter of $904.6 million.
The company also increased its fiscal year 2025 revenue guidance. CrowdStrike’s stock price was up 6.8 percent, to $326.44 a share, in after-hours trading Tuesday.
One emerging area of focus for more partners with CrowdStrike is in the area of SIEM (security information and event management), Kurtz said. In May, CrowdStrike announcedthe general availability launch for its Falcon Next-Gen SIEM offering, as well as several new capabilities for the product.
Helping organizations move into their next-gen SIEM is a partner led opportunity,” Kurtz said. “Partners see where the puck is going and have approached CrowdStrike to build their next-gen SIEM practices.”
Such practices can span “data governance, data movement, dashboard configuration and automation response creation, as well as managed SIEM services,” he said.
Kurtz noted that major changes in the SIEM vendor landscape are helping to direct partners and customers to CrowdStrike’s offering in the space. In May, Palo Alto Networks announced it’s planning to acquire IBM’s QRadar SaaS business for $500 million, while LogRhythm disclosed plans to merge with Exabeam.
Those deals followed Cisco’s closing of its $28 billion acquisition of SIEM stalwart Splunk in March. All in all, “more happened in the SIEM market over the past few months than in decades,” Kurtz said Tuesday.
For CrowdStrike, the market activity is among the factors that “have really contributed to a broad interest and adoption of our technology,” he said.
“Given the movement in the marketplace, we’ve got many, many customers reaching out, dissatisfied with the current vendors,” Kurtz said.
Partners and customers are “also interested in leveraging a completely integrated solution with the data they already have,” he said. “So we think this is a massive, massive opportunity for us. And given what we’re doing in the space — and the innovations we’re driving, particularly with AI and the data we have — we think it’s going to be a many multi-year journey of opportunity for us in a very antiquated space, and one that’s ripe for disruption.”