The partner verdict on CrowdStrike's EMEA Channel Partner Symposium

What did CrowdStrike’s partners think of the announcements made during its first ever European partner event?

The partner verdict on CrowdStrike's EMEA Channel Partner Symposium

CrowdStrike is betting big with its announcements of going from $3bn to $10bn, increasing its SMB focus, and switching to a platform play, but what do its partners think?

Last week the endpoint security vendor held its first ever CrowdStrike EMEA Channel Partner Symposium in Lisbon, Portugal.

During the two-day event, CrowdStrike lifted the lid on the future of the company, which included a major ambition to grow from $2.9bn annual recurring revenue in FY2024 to $10bn in 5-7 years.

The vendor also spoke about its goal of replacing legacy antivirus technology in the SMB space and how it's consolidating to a single platform.

To find out what the channel partners in attendance made of all these announcements, CRN got face-to-face with three of them to find out their biggest takeaways, thoughts of the announcements from a partner perspective, and what they think of CrowdStrike's strategy and how it impacts their business.

John Maynard, CEO, Adarma

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Adarma in a snapshot: MSSP. Headcount 325. Headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland.

What have been some of your biggest takeaways from the event?

"One of the reasons why we work with CrowdStrike is they power our services.

"Our managed services business grew 54 per cent year-over-year last year and a lot of that is driven by the CrowdStrike platform.

"What came out yesterday is the pace of innovation within the CrowdStrike portfolio. The pace of change within CrowdStrike is pretty dramatic."

What have you made of the event's announcements from a partner perspective?

"As a partner it's simplicity of deployment that is critical for us and our customers.

"The fact CrowdStrike is a single agent strategy is differentiated. You get a number of other competitors that, when you start thinking about an XDR platform that covers multiple different domains and capabilities, you do tend to see lots of different agents and then you see bloated agents that are really really heavy, and CrowdStrike's the opposite.

"For us it's simple, easy deployment, single-agent where customers can turn on some of these capabilities quite quickly.

"The challenge comes that when you start looking at the breadth of the CrowdStrike platform, that's where we come in. It's very hard for organisations to get the true benefit out of it in terms of trying to get the capability out of the platform and drive this best practice usage.

"What we don't want is lots of different agents. We don't want endpoints falling over, or we don't want really clunky multiple agents that we have to deploy.

"From a service provider perspective, we want a single console. It's super easy for our tier one, tier two, tier three threat hunters to go in and do the work that they need to do.

"What we're also seeing is simplification of the partner programmes and some of the partner tools that we use."

What do you make of CrowdStrike's strategy and how it affects your business?

"We're a deep specialist in security operations. The only thing we do is anything that is involved or touches a security operations centre.

"We're the largest independent security operations specialists in Europe, by headcount, and by the volume of business that we do.

"For us, the heart of security operations is detection and response which is the heart of what CrowdStrike does.

"Our strategy to broaden from detection and response is to understand the attack surface. And that's exactly what CrowdStrike is doing when it starts to think about exposure management, service management, and then effectively looking at what's happening identity or something in cloud that's fundamentally aligned to our strategy to understand exposures before an alert fires."

Continue reading to hear from more CrowdStrike partners...

The partner verdict on CrowdStrike's EMEA Channel Partner Symposium

What did CrowdStrike’s partners think of the announcements made during its first ever European partner event?

Rob Pooley, solutions director, Saepio

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Saepio in a snapshot: Founded in 2016. Headquartered in High Wycombe. Focuses on security and security assessment and awareness.

What have been some of your biggest takeaways from the event?

"The consolidation story is really relevant for us, consolidating multiple tools for customers and making it into this platform play.

"CrowdStrike having that legacy of being an EDR, it's not just an EDR. It's full security, monitoring, and logging, as well as the modern cloud elements.

"So it's that consolidation piece, customers are looking for that and partners are looking for it. And it does deliver better security outcomes for customers.

"I think the innovation in some of the newer areas like cloud is really key. One of the bits of the puzzle that was missing for us with our customers in the past was around the logging piece. And now LogScale is there and it's being implemented and a part of the platform.

"That's great because it rounds off the part that previously was a heavy CrowdStrike investment but then there was this other vendor in the mix doing the logging piece. Now we can consolidate that away and bring it to under one piece from CrowdStrike."

What have you made of the event's announcements from a partner perspective?

"The partner-first strategy is clear. When we first started working there was more of this slight connotation of direct sales people still wanted to own the sales cycle.

"We call it the ‘have your cake and eat it' model when the partner will open the door and then the vendor might come in and own things a bit more.

"But with all the channel hires, like Claudia Hebden, Northern European alliances director and others over the years, that partner-first mentality is clear.

"The plan to go from a $3bn business now to a $10bn business and with partners being one of the key things to get them there is a statement of intent."

What do you make of CrowdStrike's strategy and how it affects your business?

"We look at things through the lens of the customer and we know that what they want to do is right size their cybersecurity.

"Not everyone needs to have Ministry of Defence levels of security. There's a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt out there. It's about what we call rightsizing.

"CrowdStrike's portfolio allows you to rightsize things for customers. You don't have to take investments off of companies and give them tools that they're not necessarily going to need at their level of maturity.

"You can go on a maturity journey with CrowdStrike and implement the right modules at lower levels of maturity and then add in the right capabilities based on the risks they see.

"There's an alignment between CrowdStrike's approach and our approach."

The partner verdict on CrowdStrike's EMEA Channel Partner Symposium

What did CrowdStrike’s partners think of the announcements made during its first ever European partner event?

Juan Campillo, cybersecurity product marketing director, Telefonica Tech

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Telefonica Tech in a snapshot: 6,200 headcount. Has worked with CrowdStrike since 2019. Headquartered in Madrid, Spain.

What have been some of your biggest takeaways from the event?

"For me the biggest takeaway is the sustainability of the growth story.

"There's a clear plan. There is a very addressable market. There is a core strength, which is EDR, that makes a lot of sense for the bets CrowdStrike are making.

"Having this core focus on stopping breaches is helping us. When you look at cloud security for instance. You can do cloud security, you can protect the cloud, or you can protect the cloud and be able to respond against an incident in the cloud.

"The same with identity. There are a lot of other solutions that protect identity or help you manage identity, but being able to react and respond to to an identity threat is different.

"That's why I believe in the story of $3bn to $10bn. That story resonates perfectly in the three-year plan of our strategy."

What do you make of CrowdStrike's strategy and how it affects your business?

"There is one part of the strategy which is this convergence of the customer.

"It impacts our strategy significantly because we need to ensure we are aligned on a commercial level, for instance.

"If we want to mirror CrowdStrike's convergence approach to any given customer, we're going to find other companies already working on architecture for customers.

"So the rules of engagement is delivery in terms of commercial relationships.

"That's something in the past we have worked on very well with CrowdStrike.

"We need to manage and design a new model that requires a new partnership or probably a new channel model to take advantage of this convergence and at the same time, understand where the industry is going to go."