Optiv Hits $1 Billion In Sales With CrowdStrike: ‘We’re Both Hungry’

The two cybersecurity standouts have doubled down on their partnership in recent years around CrowdStrike’s consolidated Falcon security platform, executives tell CRN.

CrowdStrike and Optiv announced Monday they’ve surpassed $1 billion in joint sales to date — a rare milestone driven by an unusually tight partnership between the two cybersecurity powerhouses, executives told CRN.

While Optiv, which is No. 24 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500, and prominent security vendor CrowdStrike are each among the largest companies in their respective spaces, executives said the strong results reflect more than just their size and position.

Along with having closely aligned teams and a shared vision, the “energy and the focus and the hustle” of both companies has been critical to achieving the growth, said Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike. “It’s not just [our] size.”

Alan Mayer, senior vice president of partners, alliances and solutions at Denver-based Optiv, told CRN that the driving force behind the expansion of the partnership is that “we’re both hungry. And we're both innovating.”

“A lot of this progress is not just on [continuing] what's always happened,” Mayer said. “It's new ways of doing things. It's new perspectives.”

One example has been the increased focus for the partnership in 2023 on selling to customers through the AWS Marketplace. This avenue represented a “material part of this year's performance” for the Optiv-CrowdStrike partnership, Bernard said.

“We had a goal for what we wanted to accomplish together with Optiv in that regard — we hit that goal a while ago,” he said.

For the two companies, the $1 billion sales milestone for the CrowdStrike Falcon platform came largely during the past seven years, executives said.

And while CrowdStrike has thousands of partners, Optiv has clearly stood out from the pack in terms of the breadth and depth of its cybersecurity capabilities, Bernard said.

“They're in rarefied air in the space,” he said. And for CrowdStrike, “you can count these types of [partnerships] on a single hand.”

A Matter Of Trust

A common question from partners, according to Bernard, is “‘how do we become the next Optiv?’”

Much of what makes the partnership work so well may sound basic, he said: Getting the right teams to work together, focusing on meeting customer needs, crafting the right strategy.

“It sounds easy, but it's actually really hard,” Bernard said. “If it was that easy, everybody would be doing things like this.”

Ultimately, “these kinds of numbers are very few and far between in this industry,” he said.

Mayer said that true alignment between any two teams will always come down to trust, and “we have that.”

“It is from the top of the house to the services teams, the sales teams, operations,” he said. “We work very well together — and have for quite some time.”

2024 Opportunities

For the coming year, key opportunities for the CrowdStrike-Optiv partnership include working with customers around consolidating more of their security tools on the cloud-native Falcon platform, according to executives.

In 2024, “I think the consolidation theme is going to become even more pronounced,” Bernard said.

That will include delivering additional CrowdStrike tools, beyond its flagship endpoint security product, to more customers, executives said. Fast-growing areas for CrowdStrike include cloud security, identity protection and its LogScale “next-gen” SIEM (security information and event management) offering, the company has said.

Bringing CrowdStrike’s generative AI technology for security analysts, Charlotte AI, to customers represents another major opportunity in 2024 for IPO-bound Optiv, Mayer said.

The potential of the technology is massive, he said, with its promise of dramatically boosting productivity and effectiveness for security teams.

A year from now, Bernard said, customers will no doubt be looking back and saying, “‘How did AI become a part of my cybersecurity strategy in new ways in 2024?’”