CrowdStrike Europe channel boss on why partners are crucial to its $10bn goal
John Taylor breaks down the endpoint protection vendor’s goals for 2024, current challenges, and channel priorities for this year
Channel partners are crucial for CrowdStrike's plan of growing from a $2.9bn business to $10bn ARR vendor.
This is what John Taylor, VP of European alliances states as he fills CRN in on his channel plans for 2024.
One of the main messages from the vendor's first European partner event in Lisbon last November was its goal of going from $2.9bn annual recurring revenue in FY2024 to $10bn in 5-7 years.
Taylor describes to CRN the three ‘mores' necessary to achieve this goal.
"There are more modules. We've demonstrated what we're doing with cloud, with identity protection, and next generation SIEM. We will build partners as part of that route to market, our go-to-market, and our services delivery with those modules," he says.
"We're starting to get more addressable market. Since we came back from Lisbon, you would have seen the announcement about Falcon Go, going right the way down to that SOHO, SMB environment and increasing our addressable market.
"So there's more total addressable market (TAM) for us and we have to use channels to get to that TAM.
"And then the other one is more routes to market.
"Routes to market equals channels. The channels and the alliances piece fits within there. There's more modules, so we need more skills. Where do we get the skills from? The partners.
"We're not going to hire thousands and thousands of sellers. We're going to enable our partners to do that."
His priorities for the channel
In August Taylor told CRN he wants CrowdStrike's partners to be investing in their services offering.
This expectation remains unchanged, as he states CrowdStrike is ready to support partners on this journey.
"Number one, help partners build out more services.
"When you're growing a platform at the rate that we're growing it at, and customers are buying it at the rate they are, they need services to be wrapped around that.
"My challenge is to ensure that our partners are appropriately enabled, not just to sell it, but also to then deliver it and create positive experiences for the customer so that they want to consume more."
Taylor adds his other priority focuses on doubling down in the spaces that will help move CrowdStrike to the next level of cyber - cloud, identity protection and next generation SIEM.
2023 highlights
Taylor's passion for the partner ecosystem shines through as he names November's inaugural symposium as his highlight of last year.
"It was long overdue and it's fair to say there was pent up demand for partners to hear about where we were going and the plan for 2024," he says.
"But my overriding sense that I took away from the event was that people bought into the platform story. That's prediction number one, I think next year will be and continue to be a year of a consolidation around the platform.
"And I think that message came really strongly through to the partners and the partners understood what that means and the goodness that that brings out."
Next challenges
CrowdStrike's aim to grow to $10bn is no small feat.
Financial services company The Motley Fool recently weighed up whether or not CrowdStrike will be a $1tn company by 2030.
However, alongside the obstacles on this growth journey, Taylor says another challenge is ensuring CrowdStrike doesn't lose sight of its culture.
"When you're growing as quickly as us, it's maintaining culture and making sure that the people that we bring into the business, maintain the culture of this business and then remains a fun place to be.
"When you're in a hiring business like we are it's sometimes easy in other environments to forget to have fun. So the challenge is to carry on growing, but to have fun.
"Number two, is to make sure that we can foresee what the operational requirements are in business in order to be able to operationalise a business that's growing at the rate that we are."