CrowdStrike has promoted McAfee and Sophos veteran Michael Rogers to vice president of global business development, channel and alliances -- essentially, global channel chief. Rogers succeeds Matthew Polly, who shifts to VP of North America mid-market sales at the cybersecurity company.
In a prepared statement about Rogers leading CrowdStrike's partner program forward, Chief Sales Officer Jim Seidel said:
“Michael Rogers has proven to be a great leader and advocate for CrowdStrike, our partners and our customers, and no one has played a bigger role in growing our channel program over the past few years. In a rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape, Michael has always championed a one-team-one-fight approach to helping our customers – bringing to bear the best of CrowdStrike and the unique value of our partners into some of the most critical areas of security. He’s the perfect choice to lead into the next chapter of partner growth.”
Added Rogers:
“The difference with CrowdStrike – and why we’ve been able to bring together such an elite network of partners – is that we’ve always advocated for an ecosystem approach that puts customers at the center of our program. CrowdStrike and our partners are laser-focused on delivering the solutions, intelligence and expertise required to combat today’s advanced cyber adversaries and help customers stop breaches. When you find partners as committed to the mission as you, customers win, plain and simple."
Amid the channel chief transition, CrowdStrike has channel partner and MSSP momentum. For fiscal year 2022, CrowdStrike's MSSP business grew more than 200% year-over-year. Still, the company's own managed detection and response (MDR) security services also are popular on the direct sales front.
CrowdStrike Business Performance, Security Service Launches
CrowdStrike's overall business appears to be performing well. Indeed, CrowdStrike revenue was $431 million in Q4 of fiscal 2022, up 63 percent compared to $264.9 million in the corresponding quarter last year. GAAP net loss was $42.0 million, compared to $19.0 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, the company added. The results generally beat Wall Street's expectations.
CrowdStrike competes in the endpoint, managed and extended detection and response (EDR, MDR and XDR) markets. All of those segments are growing rapidly -- but so is competition. Dozens of security companies now have MSP friendly partner programs. And in some cases, CrowdStrike has been launching direct sales-centric services. An example would be the Falcon Identity Threat Protection Complete, a “fully managed” solution that combines identity threat prevention and IT policy enforcement. The March 2022 launch announcement for that service made no mention of partner opportunities.
