CrowdStrike Europe Partner Symposium 2024: Four CrowdStrike execs give their top message to partners
The vendor’s president, chief business officer, and global and EMEA channel chiefs tell CRN what they wanted partners to take away from the annual European event
CrowdStrike's bosses want their channel partners to realise the power of the platform, the opportunity with CrowdStrike and to up their managed services game.
These were the top messages from CrowdStrike's second annual Europe Partner Symposium 2024 in Venice, Italy this week.
European partners came together and saw the likes of Daniel Bernard, chief business officer and Mike Sentonas, president at CrowdStrike take to the stage to hear the latest updates from the cybersecurity vendor.
Partners heard how they were critical to CrowdStrike's goal to reach $10bn by 2030 after contributing 41 per cent to the EDR pioneer's fiscal year 23.
To find out more about the message the vendor wanted to get across to partners during their time at Italy's city of bridges and water, CRN spoke with four of CrowdStrike's senior leaders.
Daniel Bernard, chief business officer
2024 channel priorities
"One, enabling partners to succeed and win and make a difference with Next-Gen SIEM and also cloud security.
"That's another area that's a huge greenfield market where organisations have upwards of three, four, or five, six or seven products that they're using in a piecemeal fashion. And there's a huge consolidation opportunity.
"As more organisations have moved and will continue to move to cloud, how do you secure the cloud? That's a big question that we're helping customers to answer.
"From a technology perspective, those are the two pieces of technology out of our 28 modules that I think are, one, large opportunities, two, have super high growth areas and three, are very transformational for customers.
"On the customer standpoint, we have a model that's really growing here called Falcon Flex, that helps organisations create a consolidation plan, an innovation plan, and a transformation plan.
"That's a multi-year agreement where they're selecting the technologies they want to move into over time. They're making this commitment with us. And then over time, they have the flexibility to spend how they want to spend, to deploy when they want to deploy. And of course, get the best value on everything we're doing.
"Partners play a really pivotal role in our flex programme, because they're the implementation drivers for the consumption.
"This becomes a really exciting opportunity that over the second half of the year we'll be accelerating with partners where they become very embedded in our Flex motion. And the earnings potential for them is certainly very exciting as well."
Growth of MSPs
"The models are constantly evolving of how customers want to consume technology.
"Falcon Flex is a part of that at the enterprise level and beyond. MSP is one of our fastest growing businesses at CrowdStrike and there's a couple of reasons why.
"First, we've always been outcomes focused. Customers are less interested in the ‘how' they're more interested in the outcome and the outcome of using our technology and stopping breaches. So it creates a lot of simplicity and clarity.
"Second, CrowdStrike has emerged as the operating system of cybersecurity. If you go to the world's largest government SOCs what's on the screen? CrowdStrike.
"The company and what we're doing in the world is bigger than a consumption model. It's really this foundational approach to how the world does cybersecurity today and the AI era.
"So when it comes to technology I have confidence that the MSP is building a relationship of trust."
What message do you want partners to take away from CrowdStrike's Europe Partner Symposium 2024?
"The platform creates consolidation.
"The platform is continuing to innovate, grow and expand. The platform wins.
"That's really the main message of today.
"We are cybersecurity's ecosystem. There's no law of diminishing marginal returns here. The more modules you bring to a customer and more capabilities, the more they like it."
What have been the most common partner questions you've heard?
"Partners are always interested in how they can build their pipeline. How can they grow their business?
"We're really well set up to answer that, whether it's taking an existing customer that's using a couple modules and growing it.
"That existing customer may have purchased that technology from another partner. But if you're a cloud security partner, and your expertise is cloud security, the world is your oyster.
"Some of our partners do certain parts of the platform really well. But the fact that we have this large install base that creates a lot of opportunities for the ecosystem to grow their business, there's still a lot of whitespace out there.
"So ‘how do I grow' is a big question. And then two, a lot of them are asking us to help them learn our new technology.
"So the desire for education is the next big one. My sense is partners see the opportunity with CrowdStrike."
Continue reading to find out where CrowdStrike president Mike Sentonas wants partners focusing...
CrowdStrike Europe Partner Symposium 2024: Four CrowdStrike execs give their top message to partners
The vendor’s president, chief business officer, and global and EMEA channel chiefs tell CRN what they wanted partners to take away from the annual European event
Mike Sentonas, president
How are partners at the forefront of the $10bn strategy?
"When we think about geographic spread, we can't be everywhere. We have no strategy to just hire 1,000s and 1,000s of people around the world. So the first part is we need partners to be able to be able to go and achieve that goal.
"We need to have a partner programme that incentivises and motivates them to work with CrowdStrike above and beyond.
"A big part of getting a partner excited is an interesting business opportunity.
"We help partners by making sure we teach them how to sell, teach them how to demo, we teach them the competitive differentiators so that they can become experts in taking CrowdStrike to a customer."
What message do you want partners to take away from CrowdStrike's Europe Partner Symposium 2024?
"The biggest thing I want people to take away is that we're at an early stage of our growth. We're at an early stage of writing the history of CrowdStrike. There's a huge opportunity for partners to get on board as part of that story.
"The strategy of how we win together with partners is so clear.
"It's an interesting time in the security industry, because there's a lot of channel partners that are questioning the vendors. That they once thought were part of their ecosystem that are realising they're not actually that channel friendly. They're doing things direct.
"They've openly said, ‘we're gonna give away products for free which takes away the opportunity from your partner.'
"We're not doing any of that. So the biggest takeaway from partners is there's a huge opportunity for them to be part of this growth strategy with CrowdStrike."
What do you want partners to focus on?
"I want to win and lose together with partners.
"I'm looking for value partners that will work with us. I'm not looking at partners that will do one or two deals a year.
"I want partners to focus on building a business, building a security practice. Building an ecosystem that is centred around CrowdStrike.
"Now, where they focus, a big part of that is really defined by them, some of them. If you look at the partners that are at this event, some of them are services partners. Some of them focus on a specific vertical.
"Our platform is applicable to all. Where they segment and where they go to market is entirely up to them."
Coming up: CrowdStrike's respective global and EMEA channel chiefs...
CrowdStrike Europe Partner Symposium 2024: Four CrowdStrike execs give their top message to partners
The vendor’s president, chief business officer, and global and EMEA channel chiefs tell CRN what they wanted partners to take away from the annual European event
Mike Rogers, VP of global business development, channels and alliances
What message do you want partners to take away from CrowdStrike's Europe Partner Symposium 2024?
"For me, I want partners to feel like they're part of the CrowdStrike culture, which is a unified vision of stopping the breach and making the world a safer place."
Managing partner growth
"We're very mindful of bringing on the right partners, while at the same time, recognising that there are many partners that want to be part of the programme, that should be part of the programme, but they might not have the opportunity early on to have a dedicated Alliance manager, for example.
"We're investing in distribution. We've just recently hired a vice president of global distribution, Daniel Danielli.
"We're focusing on that long tail of partners to participate in the programme that otherwise if they applied to CrowdStrike directly, we just don't have enough alliance managers or bandwidth.
"CrowdStrike has mindfully increased investments, both in terms of programmes support, through our alliance programme management office, as well as incentives and VIR (value incentive rebate programme).
"We're investing in our partners and we're investing in funding headcount, resources to sit within our partner community."
What do you want partners to focus on?
"A major focus for us this year is enablement and ensuring our partners are both sales ready and system engineering ready.
"Our goal is to see our partners be able to do the cross site pitch, to be able to do demos, and to be able to do proof of values."
Click next to hear why John Taylor, EMEA VP channels and alliances wants partners upping their managed services game...
CrowdStrike Europe Partner Symposium 2024: Four CrowdStrike execs give their top message to partners
The vendor’s president, chief business officer, and global and EMEA channel chiefs tell CRN what they wanted partners to take away from the annual European event
John Taylor, EMEA VP channels and alliances
Channel priorities for 2024
"My remit is Europe and we had almost 700 trading partners last year.
"Of those 700, here's probably 500 that transacted fewer times than their fingers on one hand.
"From that perspective, we want them to be transacting 10 times 12 times 20 times.
"For me, that's where distribution comes in. It's a really foundational part of any channel ecosystem to get that distribution channel working well, integrated well. And in the same way that the direct sellers use the partners and resellers as leverage, and that they become part of their sales team. I need distribution to become part of my sales team."
Managing partner growth
"We've made some big bets.
"Partners that we're bringing on and paying particular attention to right now are partners that are dealing with very, very large transformation projects.
"I've got distribution working really, really well in pockets. But I've got to get distribution working across my landscape.
"Because in the same way that we won't continue to higher and higher and higher end user sellers. The company won't continue to higher and higher and higher, more of the same account managers.
"So it's about how do I use my programmes to get more leverage? I use my programmes to get more leverage because we now have a distributor programme, we cover more geographies, we bring in different skill sets.
"So it's a push onto distribution. We've hired distribution account managers in every region in order to do that."
Last year you said you wanted partners to invest in managed services. Is this still the case?
"Yes, because that's where they create stickiness.
"That's where internally they're incentivized to go and sell.
"What we're seeing is we're seeing the development of services that sit alongside ours and enhance the user experience. But what we're seeing in certainly the very large transformation projects, and certainly in the downstream where the MSSPs play more of a on your IT department type role, we're actually winning business because the whose partners have got services."
What is your final message to the partners at CrowdStrike's Europe Partner Symposium 2024?
"One of the changes we made from Lisbon is that we invited more of the end user sellers.
"And my message to the partners is, they will know who their account managers are. They work with them every day. But I want partners to come into our sales organisation and tell them what they're doing.
"So my message is tell people what you're doing inside of CrowdStrike and then we'll help you get to the customers who need those skills."