The majority of CrowdStrike's customer wins are partner-led deals, and sales opportunities continue to grow through online destinations like the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace, CEO George Kurtz says.
The comments surfaced during CrowdStrike's quarterly earnings call with Wall Street analysts on December 2.
"As a channel first company, just about all the deals go through the channel in some fashion," Kurtz says. "Some of them are sourced by us, some of them are sourced by the channel and in general, what we’ve seen and we’re really excited about is the fact that we’ve seen more deal registration from our partners, so deals being brought by the channel."
CrowdStrike's total revenue was $232.5 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2021, up 86 percent from the third quarter of fiscal 2020. "Because there is a strong demand for our technology, our partners are winning, they’re making money with CrowdStrike and that will continue to grow." A recent alliance with Ernst and Young (EY), in particular, has "already influenced multiple deals," Kurtz said.
Also of note, CrowdStrike continues to expand a massive data lake. And a recent acquisition, involving Zero Trust access provider Preempt Security, should further accelerate customer opportunities, the company says.
"Our massive data lake within Threat Graph grows and gets smarter by the minute, which also differentiates our managed detection services, providing visibility across all our customers," Kurtz said. "Threat Graph processes over 4 trillion high fidelity signals per week. Additionally, with the recent acquisition of Preempt Security, we will have access to a new set of user behaviors to drive new use cases such as preventing insider threats."
No doubt, CrowdStrike and its partner base have momentum. But the software company needs to maintain a balancing act with its MDR (managed detection and response) efforts. In some ways, CrowdStrike's MDR offerings potentially compete with industry MSSPs.
