3 takeaways from CrowdStrike's first ever EMEA partner event

SMBs, the platform play and the road to $10bn - all of these featured in the cyber vendor's first EMEA summit

CrowdStrike wants to be a $10bn company by 2030 and it's betting on partners, new technology and M&A to help get there.

This was one of the key takeaways at the cyber-security vendor's inaugural European channel event in Lisbon, Portugal last week.

The CrowdStrike EMEA Channel Partner Symposium was the first of its kind and covered topics spanning the security vendor's strategy, business direction, Europe operations and technology platform.

Kicking off the event was John Taylor, VP of European alliances for CrowdStrike who promised two days of "relevance".

"Our relevance to what we do and what we do for our customers, but also the relevance in terms of where we're going as a technology company, where we go into the channels and alliances company, for what it is that we try and do for you," Taylor explained to the audience.

With our top picks on how CrowdStrike demonstrated its relevance during the conference, here are CRN's key takeaways from the event.

CrowdStrike's focus on SMBs

Ahead of the conference, the vendor announced a new, more affordable version of its endpoint security tool CrowdStrike Falcon Go, for SMBs.

Speaking with CRN about whether CrowdStrike is switching focus to the SMB space, chief business officer Daniel Bernard says a majority of the market still uses legacy antivirus (AV) solutions.

"For us the opportunities are strong to continue the revolution and displacements that we brought to this market helping customers liberate themselves from signature based AV that's reactive and effective.

"One of the strongholds or areas of the market where there's still a lot of legacy AV is small medium businesses, and it's because the technologies that they have access to are still a lot of the names that we were all familiar with about a decade ago.

"This is the next phase in our strategy of making sure we have the right product market fit and we're doing everything we can to continue our market share for the whole company."

On whether CrowdStrike's partners are ready for the SMB market, Bernard explains what a vendor needs and what CrowdStrike has to pull this off is a mix of the right product, marketing and partners.

"The problems other companies face is they don't have the right products first.

"Then you need the right go-to-market motion. Having the direct purchase on the website, working with the broadest IT channel, many would say we're a leader in the endpoint space, so we have the attention of the channel.

"Many of the channel partners have asked us what can we do to help them with all the demand in the small and medium business segment."

Bernard adds that the third missing piece other players might not have is the brand.

"I think there's an understanding in the market of what CrowdStrike does. What do we do? We stop breaches, it's crisp, it's clean, people understand it. We've invested a lot of money throughout the entire company in time and teams and people and building brands.

"No one has this kind of unique mix of the right product, the right to go-to-market interest and partners and then also the brand and relevance in the market."

CrowdStrike's platform play

During his keynote, Bernard outlined CrowdStrike's move from product to platform.

"The mission of stopping a breach is a very broad mission. Endpoint is a very important part of that, but I think from a security perspective, there's more that our technology is capable of.

"There's more that our innovation engine is capable of to help customers consolidate multiple point products down to a single platform," he tells CRN.

"Everyone is talking about consolidation in some way, shape, or form. There are these 3,000 point product solutions, how do we bring it all together and have a platform, the power of a platform is really unique.

"So consolidating to a single platform is super important and something that CrowdStrike uniquely has built by design.

"CrowdStrike has been on this journey from product to platform over the last couple of years."

Zeki Turedi, CrowdStrike field chief technology officer for EMEA provided CRN with a little more insight into the vendor's platform play.

"People are looking to have a single platform that allows them to interconnect into other platforms and other best of breed solutions," he explains.

"So it's no longer kind of piecemeal, it's more going down that security journey with a strategic plan.

"Using a vendor like CrowdStrike that can be the holistic view, a single pane of glass, that then can still utilise the best parts of other solutions without having that complexity.

"That's why we've always been very strong on our partner ecosystem, because there's going to be functionalities that we will never do. There's going to be competitors that we know that we need to work with. There's going to be segments in security that CrowdStrike has no interest involving ourselves with because it's a well established market with individuals doing amazing work in that space.

"It's really important that you're able to integrate it. And that's where we've been going with that XDR journey.

"So if there's data in places that we need to be able to help our customers, that we can't get ourselves and we need to have a third party integration."

From $2.9bn to $10bn

Another mission CrowdStrike proudly announced was its plan to go from $2.9bn annual recurring revenue in FY2024 to $10bn in 5-7 years.

Bernard told the audience how CrowdStrike approached Wall Street and stated it will take the business to these double-digit heights and how it plans to achieve this.

"We're gonna get there by bringing new technologies to market. We're gonna get there by selling into new market segments, like the announcement with our Falcon Go product for SMBs," he told event attendees.

"We're going to sell into new geographies, we're going to expand within our existing customer install base. And we're going to continue investing and invest like we've never invested before in our partners."

"M&A will be part of our strategy to get to the $10bn and also new innovation," he adds.

"It may not just be technology we buy, it's also technology that we build."

Joan Taule, VP of sales for Europe at CrowdStrike lifts the lid further on how CrowdStrike will rocket its revenue with a European expansion.

"We have what we call our tier one countries which are the UK, Germany, and France. These are my top priorities.

"Outside of the tier one markets, we have countries like Spain, Italy, Switzerland, the Benelux and the Nordics."