Key announcements from Fal.Con Europe 2026

Hot off of CrowdStrike’s Fal.Con Europe conference in Barcelona, CRN reports on the key announcements partners need to know

Following a bustling Fal.Con Europe, with over 3,000 people in attendance learning about the newest innovations from CrowdStrike, CRN was there to bring you the key announcements you need to know.

Crowdstrike has a new VP Europe Alliances

Exclusively reported by CRN, CrowdStrike announced the appointment of Roland Stritt as its new VP Europe Alliances at its Partner Summit on Monday.

Stritt joins the cybersecurity vendor with over 20 years of industry experience building within Europe and the channel.

He will lead the European alliances strategy, accelerate partner-led growth and grow the partner community across Europe, both through scale and the strengthening of relationships with existing partners.

The appointment comes as CrowdStrike’s MSSP business increased from less than $100m to over $1.3bn in total contract value over the last three years.

Crowdstrike acquires Fiddler and Dreadnode

On an acquisition streak, CrowdStrike announced its intentions to acquire both Fiddler AI and Dreadnode.

Fiddler AI specialises in AI agent observability, helping enterprises monitor what agents are doing and understand the decisions they make.

Dreadnode provides automated AI security testing, probing AI models, applications and agents for vulnerabilities before they are deployed.

These capabilities will extend the Falcon platform across the AI lifecycle, from identifying security weaknesses before deployment to monitoring how agents behave once in use.

The acquisitions come as CrowdStrike announced the expansion of its platform.

In conversation with CRN, CrowdStrike president Michael Sentonas explained why the acquisitions were part of the roadmap.

“You always have to look at whether to build, buy or partner.

“There are benefits to build, there are benefits to buy, there are benefits to partner and there are downsides,” he said.

“We looked at those companies, and one of the things that you'll always hear us talk about is when you're doing M&A, you look at the tech and you look at the teams.

“In both of these examples, it's incredibly innovative tech, and the teams are really strong. So, from that perspective, it makes sense to bring them on board and continue to innovate.”

Bringing on two small companies into a larger corporation means more innovation can be done on a larger scale.

He continued, “They are small companies and we are a very large company. We can take a lot of what we're doing at scale, and we can build on them and be more successful in some of those areas.

“Dreadnode is a team of very unique subject matter experts in that category, and they work really well with Bartley's [Richardson, chief AI and autonomous systems officer] team.

“The team at Fiddler, they've got incredible experience in in patient safety, in observability and big data platforms, where we're one of the major players now, and this accelerates what we’re doing in that area.

“I think it’s a better together story. Sometimes we buy things, a lot of the times we build. In this case, it made more sense to buy.”

CrowdStrike scales Project QuiltWorks across Europe

The cybersecurity vendor has also expanded Project QuiltWorks across Europe, bringing a host of new partners into the initiative, including Atos, BT, Computacenter, Pax8, Grant Thornton UK and Ignition.

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.

European partners will also gain access to Falcon IQ, with CrowdStrike positioning the channel as the layer that turns AI-generated findings into remediation work for customers.

“AI is changing the economics of vulnerability exploitation. The industry has to disrupt the economics of remediation,” said Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike.

“That’s what QuiltWorks delivers; the AI, data, infrastructure, expertise, and financial protection to take customers from finding risk to fixing it before impact.

“Expanding across Europe scales the Crowd behind that mission, giving customers more capacity to prioritise what matters and fix it faster.”

Speaking with Dan Danielli, VP of global scale partnerships at CrowdStrike, he explained why CrowdStrike was looking to expand the project in Europe.

“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.

“There's a lot of emphasis on making sure that we're driving local and sovereign outcomes, and so bringing the European specialist partners that understand the governance and compliance dynamics of the countries that they're working in has been critical, but also we need to continue to reach the volume of customers that are getting exposed, which necessitated going and bringing in more of the local specialists.”

The 15 new partners span a range of businesses in the IT industry.

“One of the other components that I think is really key is the introduction of our distribution partners.

“In some of the recent waves, they're going to start to scale out and operationalise on mass the QuiltWorks framework to the smallest of customers, which is fantastic that everybody is going to get the outcome of the coalition working together.”

Kieran Baker, managed security services lead at Grant Thornton UK, told CRN what joining QuiltWorks means for the organisation.

“We've been a CrowdStrike partner for a long time, and one of the things that we've been doing with CrowdStrike is using the data that's available to try and do proactive identification of risks and recommendations, and we've been using the ways to extract the data from CrowdStrike to build these things for customers for a long time.

“QuiltWorks with Falcon IQ is really going to help us push towards giving customers a really good roadmap to say ‘you should remediate all of this, and this is the order in which you should try and do that’.

“I think that's probably what makes QuiltWorks so exciting is that ability to help customers prioritise because cyber is such a huge blast radius for everyone, and the biggest problem is discovery in the first place.”

From a distribution perspective, Paul Eccleston, SVP, EMEA at Exclusive Networks, discussed what being part of Project QuiltWorks means for Ignition Technology and its partners.

“CrowdStrike can get involved in the discovery, the assessment and the remediation of big enterprise customers, but why should only big enterprise customers get the advantage of that?

“That’s the whole point of the platform, and what we are doing in the SMB space.

“QuiltWorks is the economics for the discovery, assessment, remediation service, but also the managed service on top of that.

“So, for us, it was absolutely what we should be doing, and but also enabling our partners to do it.

“The partner wants to build their services around the technology stack and QuiltWorks is a way for them to do that.

“But for me, the world becomes a more threatened place every day, and we've got to, collectively as an industry, provide the defence for those SMB and mid-market customers, as well as the enterprise customers.”

Ignition Technology makes multi-million-dollar Falcon Flex commitment

Ignition Technology has made a multi-million-dollar commitment to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Flex programme, aimed at expanding access to the vendor’s security platform among SMB and mid-market customers across Europe.

The distributor will work through its network of more than 1,000 partners, including MSPs and MSSPs, to extend the reach of the Falcon platform.

As part of Project QuiltWorks, Ignition Technology is also making Falcon IQ available to its partner ecosystem, enabling service providers to assess customers’ security exposures and use AI to prioritise risks.

The offering will support assessments across thousands of devices managed through the distributor’s service provider programme.

Eccleston explained why the investment is a major opportunity.

“We talk about having enterprise-grade security for the SMB, and this is this is a way of delivering that through Ignition and CrowdStrike together.”

For Ignition’s MSP and MSSP partners, “they can deliver, pretty much, the full Falcon portfolio in a multi-tenant version, which they couldn't do before, so they can control it across their SMB customer base.”

CrowdStrike had already told CRN of its intentions to double down in the SMB market, with Amanda Adams, Global SVP of Alliances, saying, “Our investment is how we are driving independence for our authorised distributors into SMBs, which is any organisation that's less than 250 employees.

“In Europe there’s hundreds of thousands of SMBs across the region, in which we are really focused on ramping up with our MSSP partners, distributors, and aggregators to open up that market for us.”

Ignition Technology’s investment will help drive CrowdStrike’s business across European SMBs.

Further in-depth interviews with CrowdStrike executives and parters from Fal.Con Europe 2026 are still to come, stay updated by subscribing to CRN UK.