CrowdStrike sees partners shifting towards deeper services capabilities

“We want to empower our partners so that CrowdStrike becomes the operating backbone of their cybersecurity offerings that they're taking out to market.”

At Fal.Con Europe 2026, CRN spoke with Julia Barruso, senior director, distribution & SMB Europe, CrowdStrike and Daniel Danielli, VP global scale partnerships, CrowdStrike, to discuss how CrowdStrike’s partner ecosystem is evolving, and how partners can turn the growing complexity around AI and cybersecurity into new services revenue.

The evolution of CrowdStrike’s partner ecosystem

As technology stacks become more complex, CrowdStrike is seeing partners move towards deeper services and consultancy capabilities.

“I think what we’re seeing is an evolution towards partners who've got deep services capabilities and deep consultancy capabilities,” said Danielli.

“The problems around cybersecurity are becoming more and more complex by the day, accelerated by AI, and the breadth of the CrowdStrike platform means that it's not just as simple as going and deploying 10,000 seats of EDR over the weekend and it just working.

“There are a lot more moving parts and integrated components that absolutely need partners' services capabilities, it needs their consultancy and change management capabilities, and it's also driving the evolution of how we're giving tools to our customers.”

He pointed to the CrowdStrike Falcon IQ platform, which uses AI agents to automate security operations, designed to reduce repetitive analyst workloads and help security teams respond to threats faster.

“[With] Falcon IQ, we can help them in that journey of really identifying the challenges that customers are going through and driving remediated pathways for them to be able to go and adopt.”

Barruso said, “In Europe, we are seeing the same thing.

“At the end of the day, the customers have specific needs, so we have partners that are covering loads of different services.

“As we’re growing the platform, when I joined back in 2019, we had something like seven modules, now we have over 34.

“All of them are going to be developing in different services and different needs for the customers.”

Scaling the CrowdStrike ecosystem

CrowdStrike has highlighted its drive into Europe with the appointment of Roland Stritt as VP Europe Alliances, with Global SVP Alliances Amanda Adams saying that “his hire is an indication of the expanding opportunity that our partners have in Europe.”

When it comes to scaling the partner ecosystem further, the cybersecurity vendor is looking to recruit more partners, as well as working with existing customers to develop deeper capabilities around CrowdStrike as AI changes the threat landscape.

“The reality is we can’t be in every single customer conversation in every corner of the globe.

“What we've recognised is, we’re now in an agent state, and that means that everybody's on the table [to be attacked].

“Once the domain of a big attack was large enterprise, now with the advent of AI, it's completely democratised the cost of an attack, and so every customer, large and small and in between, are on the table,” Danielli said.

For CrowdStrike, that widening threat landscape strengthens the case for extending its reach through partners and developing their security capabilities.

Danielli continued, “We need to reach more partners who are driving those conversations with customers, they're the trusted advisors within those customers, and we want to be able to capture that mind share and that attention.

“But we also need to elevate the capabilities of partners, and we're working aggressively with our various programmes.”

Project Quiltworks scaled across Europe

At Fal.Con Europe, CrowdStrike announced that it was scaling Project QuiltWorks across Europe with the introduction of 15 new European partners.

The initiative brings together CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence and security data with AI models, cloud infrastructure and partner expertise to help organisations identify, prioritise and remediate security risks as AI accelerates vulnerability discovery and exploitation.

Danielli said the European expansion reflected increasing demand for local and sovereign capabilities.

“We're taking a lot of feedback, not just from the initial founding coalition members, but also from our field and our customers, and it was very clear that we needed to make sure that we had localised sovereign capability, particularly in Europe,” he said.

“We want to reach all the customers, but we also understand that not all regulations are the same in America as they are in Europe,” Barruso said.

“So the partners and the way we are growing our partnerships is affecting and helping customers get the service.”

Where CrowdStrike sees partner capability gaps

As the CrowdStrike platform expands, the vendor sees gaps in the consultancy and services capabilities needed around its technology.

“George’s [Kurtz, co-founder and CEO] whole reason for starting CrowdStrike was because he saw the challenges of cybersecurity interrupting people's work,” Danielli explained.

He said that when CrowdStrike was just an EDR company, it was a simple platform to deploy, but now that has changed.

“I think our biggest challenge now is unlocking the consultancy capability and becoming the operating backbone for partners who are already driving those services that customers rely on.”

He explained that the vendor is already seeing momentum with GSIs who are driving and leading conversations around the CrowdStrike platform, “not just because we provide great security outcomes, but also because we're driving acceleration of AI adoption as the safety layer.”

Securing AI adoption was a recurring theme at Fal.Con Europe, with CrowdStrike positioning cybersecurity as an enabler for organisations looking to accelerate their use of the technology.

“One of the sayings that we use internally is, ‘Why would you get into a race car with all the safety equipment and go slower?’

“The opportunity with CrowdStrike, and I think partners are seeing this, is that we're accelerating AI adoption because we're creating the safety net for them to be able to do that.”

While the development of the CrowdStrike platform has created capability gaps as partners evolve to keep up with new technologies, it is creating an opportunity for partners.

“I think it’s a great opportunity for partners because they’re going to build all these capabilities and it’s continuous,” Barruso said.

“With this AI, what it's giving us at the moment, there’s new ways of attacking, but also new ways of protecting and new services to manage that and new services to give to the customers.

“It’s evolving all the time.”

Turning CrowdStrike’s AI push into partner revenue

Currently, the industry at large is trying to figure out how to turn AI into a true revenue opportunity, and cybersecurity partners are no different.

However, partners still face hurdles in turning AI security into repeatable managed services, with Danielli pointing to gaps in knowledge and platform awareness as continuing roadblocks.

The pair shared how partners can commercialise services around CrowdStrike.

“You can't manage what you can't see, so we’ve got to help customers get through the unknown,” Danielli said.

“The positioning of Falcon IQ as a partner led services offering, I think that's one of the biggest unlocks that we've got for customers.”

In CrowdStrike’s view, giving partners greater visibility into customers’ environments could provide the starting point for assessments, remediation work and recurring managed services.

Barruso added, “The assessments for partners, for the customers to realise what their situation is, and understanding what they think versus their reality.”

Danielli also sees an opportunity for MSPs to package those capabilities as managed outcomes, particularly for smaller customers that lack the resources to build the infrastructure themselves.

Danielli continued, “I think our managed service providers and the offerings that they have for a customer just do the easy button, click and buy the outcome, instead of having to go and build all of this infrastructure, especially for down market customers.

“I think that's a service that we're going to see take off.”

CrowdStrike wants to become partners’ security “operating backbone”

When it comes to the CrowdStrike partner ecosystem, those at the core of the operations have big ambitions.

Barruso said the main goals are “enablement, accreditation, understanding and acknowledgement, and development of their services and capabilities, and utilising everything that we are offering and the platform offers.”

Ensuring that partners are able to offer the full platform for customers is an imperative goal.

“We want to empower our partners so that CrowdStrike becomes the operating backbone of their cybersecurity offerings that they're taking out to market,” Danielli said.

“I’d love to see Falcon IQ become pervasive across how customers go and assess and deliver consultancy outcomes.

“We've just launched a brand new QuiltWorks accreditation. We're going to see that proliferate out into the market into thousands of people becoming QuiltWorks accredited and being able to take confidence into the market that we not only can mitigate some of the risk that's coming with frontier AI, but there's a safety harness in CrowdStrike that can allow you to run faster with AI.”