CrowdStrike Exec On New Pax8 Partnership: MSP Market Is The ‘Next Foray’ For Growth

‘What Pax8 has done in terms of creating this disruptive cloud marketplace makes it easy to buy, easy to scale and easy to bill. ... We chose Pax8 not only because of their scale and reach from a global perspective, but also the experience that partners have,’ says Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike.

Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike

Cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike has partnered with cloud distributor Pax8 to further its footprint in the MSP market and help enhance protection and mitigation when it comes cyber risks.

“We are always talking to our partners, listening to the challenges they’re facing and how Pax8 can make those challenges easier and reduce the friction,” Nick Heddy, chief commerce officer for Denver-based Pax8, told CRN. “Security is the hot topic. The landscape is evolving, and MSPs are being targeted more than they ever have.”

In the past there has been a “misconception” about SMBs not being a target for cyberattacks, he said, and “there have been some instances where we now know that not to be true.”

“Enterprise security players with some of the best technology in the world, like CrowdStrike, have been requested by our partners for some time,” he added.

[Related: CrowdStrike Unveils Managed XDR: 5 Big Things To Know]

The CrowdStrike Falcon platform offers AI-powered protection across endpoint, cloud, identity and data from a unified, modern XDR platform.

Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike has mostly been focused on Fortune 500 companies and large enterprise global expansion, said Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike.

“This is the next foray,” he told CRN. “The MSP market is really the next foray of where we want to take growth. What Pax8 has done in terms of creating this disruptive cloud marketplace makes it easy to buy, easy to scale and easy to bill. It’s the whole life-cycle management of how an MSP consumes technology. We chose Pax8 not only because of their scale and reach from a global perspective, but also the experience that partners have.”

Mark Menzies, president and CTO of New York-based MSP Overview Technology Solutions, is happy to see the partnership as he said CrowdStrike has never been widely available to smaller MSPs.

“Their commitment to Pax8 is exciting to me because that means that CrowdStrike is not only available in the channel but it’s available in a very easy, straightforward way,” he told CRN. “We always had an issue with getting CrowdStrike, we were never able to. Now that it’s an option, it’s absolutely wonderful. They’re one of the gold standards out there.”

CrowdStrike’s platform has 23 different modules for MSPs to choose from. The platform will be available in the Pax8 marketplace later this year.

“If you’re an MSP and you want to take a customer on an EDR to XDR journey, CrowdStrike. If you want to take them on an identity protection journey, CrowdStrike. If you want to take a customer on a cloud security journey, CrowdStrike. If you want to go on an ITOps, hygiene vulnerability management journey, CrowdStrike,” Bernard said. “That’s what MSPs are looking for: deploy once, utilize many.”

The news comes less than two weeks before Pax8’s inaugural Beyond conference in Denver where Heddy said partners needed Pax8 to give them a “heads up.”

“There are components of this where Pax8 is the only place in the world to get CrowdStrike MSP Falcon under a certain threshold,” he said. “Part of the power of Pax8 and CrowdStrike together is reducing the barriers of entry and reducing the friction points of a partner being able to try this for one of their customers before they deploy it across their entire customer base.”

Bernard wanted the announcement to gain momentum and be a “rolling thunder” as it relates to helping partners.

“We’re going to be at Beyond and we’re going to speak about what we’re doing together,” he said. “We’re going to talk about the power of this technology, how it transformed what cybersecurity used to be for an MSP, where we’re taking it together and how we’re bringing MSPs into the era of XDR.

“What’s different about CrowdStrike is this was technology that was created to transform cybersecurity for the world,” he added. “MSPs are a new segment for us and we’re proud to start the party with Pax8.”