CrowdStrike CEO attacks legacy vendors as sales soar

Vendor sees revenue climb 86 per cent in Q3

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has called out some of the biggest names in cybersecurity after seeing sales rocket at his firm.

The vendor saw sales climb 86 per cent year on year to $232.5m during the quarter ending 31 October.

Annual run-rate revenue was up 81 per cent to $907.4m.

Kurtz has frequently called out Symantec, now owned by Broadcom, on earnings calls over recent quarters, but this time went a step further and listed vendors he claims CrowdStrike is displacing in enterprise customers.

He picked out one Fortune 1,000 company that ripped out a number of competitors across dozens of subsidiaries in favour of CrowdStrike.

"This customer took advantage of multiple aspects of the Falcon platform expanding traditional endpoints and servers, as well as cloud assets to solve several business problems and give the parent company and its board of directors peace of mind," he said.

He picked out a second customer, in the healthcare space, which he said ripped out McAfee and SentinelOne as they "could not be deployed because of performance and/or interoperability problems".

Speaking more broadly, he accused vendors in the cybersecurity space of claiming to be affective on paper, but ultimately falling down in the field.

"I've never seen a PowerPoint that was wrong, but when you put things into practice, things don't work.

"Slideware is a big part of the industry unfortunately and when customers actually go through the testing process… the stuff doesn't work in the lab, it's hard to get rolled out, [and] there are incompatibility issues.

"You can't just add marketing dollars to a legacy technology and hope it works."

Kurtz also reiterated the importance of the channel to the vendor's strategy, saying "the majority of the deals are partner led", adding the number of deal registrations is accelerating.

He also opened up on CrowdStrike's recently announced distribution partnership with EY.

"They've got a tremendous amount of penetration in large enterprises," he said.

"They've got the ear of the board of directors and executives and to have CrowdStrike partner with EY to help secure that digital transformation I think is a win for everyone included."

The chief exec said that the vendor's growth is not entirely COVID led, claiming the pandemic has acted as a catalyst, rather than a driving in its own right.

I think a lot of folks and a lot of companies have purchased their laptops to work from home in prior quarters and we're through that.

"So now we're seeing this kind of steady state of acceleration continuing into the future with respect to demand for cloud products and digital transformation.

"That's how we see it overall as the broad-based strength continues and so that's how we think about the future."