5 Big Themes At CrowdStrike’s Americas Partner Symposium

The expansion of the Falcon Flex subscription model, cyber insurance and cloud security are among the major topics at the cybersecurity vendor’s event this week, according to Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard.

The expansion of CrowdStrike’s Falcon Flex subscription model, cyber insurance and cloud security are among the major focus areas at the cybersecurity giant’s Americas Partner Symposium this week, Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard told CRN.

The event, being held in Southern California, is being attended by 170 executives from top CrowdStrike partners, Bernard (pictured) said.

The symposium also comes as CrowdStrike released its latest quarterly financial results, which showed the company beating expectations for its growth. On Tuesday, CrowdStrike Co-founder and CEO George Kurtz said during the company’s quarterly call that channel partners have been at the center of major consolidation activity on the Falcon platform.

“Partners are a key driver of market consolidation — both representing our technology to their end customers and also consolidating their efforts away from [other] vendors” with more limited functionality, he said during the call.

What follows are five key themes at CrowdStrike’s Americas Partner Symposium.

Product Consolidation

Much of the discussion at CrowdStrike’s Americas Partner Symposium is centered around tool consolidation, which partners and customers are both seeking to accelerate for a variety of reasons. Kurtz said during the call Tuesday that the company is finding major wins with partners in this area.

“In our channel ecosystem at large, we’re seeing partners deprioritizing other vendors on their line cards to consolidate their time, headcount and go-to-market focus on CrowdStrike,” he said.

Expansion Of Falcon Flex

CrowdStrike debuted its Falcon Flex subscription model toward the end of last year and it has already been getting massive traction, executives said. The model helps to incentivize customers to deploy more of CrowdStrike’s 28 modules, through providing “the flexibility to deploy the different modules at the right time, as other products come up for renewal,” Bernard told CRN.

Bernard said the model has caught on with CrowdStrike’s larger partners, and the company is now looking to expand the approach to a broader set of channel partners. That is making Falcon Flex a top area of discussion during the symposium this week, he said.

Falcon Flex “really is an invitation to consolidate,” Bernard said. “It makes it more flexible and easier than ever before to consolidate on the Falcon platform.”

The Falcon Flex model is a significant opportunity for partners for a number of reasons, one of which is that it can lead to much larger deals with customers, he said.

“It can really help them to super-size deals,” Bernard said. “These very large transactions are very large earnings opportunities for partners who are able to drive the discussion, as well as run the programs.”

New Cyber Insurance Program

On Wednesday, CrowdStrike announced a new program that also aims to yield major new opportunities for partners, Bernard said.

The program, Falcon for Insurability, enables insurers to provide customers with reduced rates on their cyber insurance policies in connection with using CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform.

CrowdStrike’s track record in reducing cyber risk with its tools across numerous security categories gives insurers the confidence to discount policies based on usage of Falcon, Bernard said. “They want to underwrite organizations that have Falcon deployed because their risk profile is lower,” he said.

Insurers that have signed up to participate in the program are Ascot Group, AXA XL, Beazley Insurance, Berkley Cyber Risk Solutions, Coalition and Resilience.

Cloud Security Opportunity

CrowdStrike continues to find substantial growth in cloud security and sees it as a major opportunity for an expanding set of channel partners, Bernard said.

And in cloud security, consolidation is again a theme — with CrowdStrike continuing to “consolidate multiple point product vendors,” he noted.

The interest and adoption of generative AI is another big driver in the cloud security market, Bernard said, as more customers look to enable the use of GenAI by running their own models in the cloud — all of which needs to be protected.

“The gold rush around generative AI is creating a demand environment that's very rich and robust for cloud security,” he said.

Overall in cloud security, “we see so much potential and opportunity,” Bernard said.

Next-Gen SIEM Opportunity

Another emerging area of focus for more partners with CrowdStrike is in the area of SIEM (security information and event management), executives said. In May, CrowdStrike announced the general availability launch for its Falcon Next-Gen SIEM offering, as well as several new capabilities for the product.

“Helping organizations move into their next-gen SIEM is a partner led opportunity,” Kurtz said during the call Tuesday. “Partners see where the puck is going and have approached CrowdStrike to build their next-gen SIEM practices.”

Such practices can span “data governance, data movement, dashboard configuration and automation response creation, as well as managed SIEM services,” he said.

In the SIEM market, Bernard said that CrowdStrike is finding huge opportunities for working with partners around “liberating customers from legacy products that they're eager to move away from.”

“One of the most important facets of using a SIEM is, bringing in the data from all the relevant sources,” he said. And in that regard, CrowdStrike has an advantage because it already has many of the key data sources that customers will want to analyze in a SIEM, including endpoint detection and response (EDR) data as well as data from cloud security and identity protection tools, according to Bernard.

“All that data is already natively there and is analyzed far more deeply, with better context and richer alerts,” he said. And in terms of cost savings, that means customers don’t have to pay to export data and “don't need a pipeline — you don't need to worry about how to bring the data in.”

“We eliminate all of that for a better native experience,” Bernard said.