CrowdStrike hopes tech partnerships will help VARs sell 'more joined-up story'

Vendor establishing partnerships in UK and aims to expand into Europe by the end of the year

End-point security vendor CrowdStrike has partnered with a number of technology vendors to integrate its products, which it believes will help resellers sell them.

CrowdStrike has announced that it will partner with between six and 12 orchestration and automation vendors, focusing mainly on incident response. Mike East, vice president of sales EMEA at CrowdStrike, said this is to make sure the vendor is not just "a single pane of glass; we want to be part of someone's ecosystem."

He explained: "We have recognised, particularly with our incident-response work, that there are a lot of orchestration and automation partners working in that space. We can provide the intelligence but also the insight on what is happening on the end-point, to then allow customers to respond to that in a much more efficient manner.

"It is about taking our technology and integrating it with other technology out there so it can be more seamless."

The California-based vendor, founded in 2011, has just raised $100m (£70.5m) from series-C funding led by Google Capital. The firm claims to alert organisations when they have experienced a breach, contain the breach and give the company attributes so they know who targeted them.

East said these partnerships will help its resellers and systems integrators to sell a more rounded portfolio.

"Some of these solutions we are integrating with could be solutions our resellers also sell," he said. "They can sell a more joined-up story. Rather than their integrating lots of products themselves, they've actually got something that is pre-integrated.

"This is good news for all our partners because it means there is more for them to sell; not just our technology, but the technology we will integrate with."

The vendor currently has about six channel partners in the UK and East said that CrowdStrike wanted to focus on establishing its UK partner base before launching in Europe.

"We wanted to get our beachhead in the UK, and having pretty much achieved that we are moving into northern and southern Europe. I imagine by the end of the year we will have a couple of good system integrators, global service providers and a handful of resellers for each of the regions in northern, southern and central Europe," he added.

According to Alex Mesguich, senior vice president of research at Context, traditional endpoint security in the UK saw a five per cent decrease between 2015 and 2016. In the same period, cloud-based security grew two per cent.

He said: "Cloud as a platform is going to grow, and where there is cloud there is obviously security. There is definitely a potential moving forward that more companies will move into a cloud model for delivering security endpoint.

"Although there is massive potential here, they will need more sophisticated tools to enable partners to actually sell cloud security, to make it easier in a multi-vendor cloud offering."