'Partners are leaving Symantec and joining us' - CrowdStrike CEO

George Kurtz takes aim at cybersecurity stalwart again as revenue soars

CrowdStrike's CEO has taken another shot at competitor Symantec after revealing huge growth in Q1.

The next-gen security firm's revenue rose 185 per cent year on year to $178.1m, in the quarter ending 30 April.

The vendor also surprised markets with a non-GAAP net income of $4.5m, with a loss having been expected.

On an earnings call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, chief exec George Kurtz highlighted the importance of the channel in growing sales, again swiping at Symantec and claiming that its rival's partners are jumping ship.

CrowdStrike also highlighted a recent partnership with Computacenter in its earnings release.

"More broadly on the partner front, we have continued to see significant demand," Kurtz said.

"Partners across the globe are increasingly turning to CrowdStrike as their partner of choice as Symantec abandons large segments of the market and customers desperately need to protect the remote workforce."

Kurtz said this demand is driving growth, with deal registrations up over 200 per cent year on year on Q1.

"CrowdStrike's mission, platform and brand are clearly resonating with customers and partners as we continue to see a very favourable competitive landscape, as we discussed last quarter," he added.

More generally, Kurtz said that CrowdStrike has benefited from the shift to remote working for many businesses, claiming that IT teams are turning away from on-prem security where possible.

"It is mission critical to protect workloads irrespective of where they are located on or off the corporate network," he said.

"We believe these trends have helped increase our leadership in the security cloud category that we pioneered.

"We continue to win new logos as companies are rapidly pivoting away from on-premises legacy technologies and moving to cloud-native architectures that provide prevention, visibility, and control on a single platform.

"Additionally, the competitive environment has evolved to our favour as market share of the incumbents continues to erode."