CrowdStrike Symposium: Partners Driving Innovation, Growth

During the symposium, CrowdStrike unveiled Falcon for Insurability, a new program allowing cyber insurers to provide organizations with cyber protection from the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity platform at preferred rates.

With Falcon for Insurability, insurers including Ascot Group, AXA XL, Beazley Insurance, Berkley Cyber Risk Solutions, Coalition and Resilience reduce underwriting risk knowing that insured organizations have cyber protection from the Falcon platform to improve cyber resilience and stop breaches.

CrowdStrike’s Amanda Adams said Falcon for Insurability provides opportunities for partners.

“Our solution providers can tap in because they're driving that conversation of what's your coverage, and if you're missing things, they're actually routed back to then add on to the CrowdStrike platform, and so there's revenue-generating opportunities there,” she said. “And then even some insurers like Beazley. For example, Beazley has a security arm, which also has managed service, and so it's a full end to end where they're providing a managed service on the back end in addition to providing premiums. So it's a great program when you think about looking at the risk that's involved for customers, but also to provide outcomes for the partners to deliver resell, but also do services.”

Next-generation security information and event management (SIEM) and cloud represent massive opportunities for CrowdStrike’s partners, Adams said.

“CrowdStrike’s next-gen SIEM offering is really the quickly emerging alternative,” she said. “We have over 30,000 customers that all are next-gen SIEM ready. And when you think about every role, whether that's reselling or leading the security operations center (SOC) transformation conversation and doing implementation services, doing the deployment, doing tuning or dashboarding, that is a huge opportunity from a market standpoint for partners to lead. And CrowdStrike is relying on those partners to deliver services. So that is one of the top themes, and it's really defining a new market category for our partners in working with CrowdStrike. It gives our customers and their teams the speed that they need to stop breaches, and the partners that lean in with us around building managed security services around it or the advisory services are going to capitalize a ton on next-gen SIEM.”

While AI currently is dominating the conversation in cybersecurity, CrowdStrike had a head start with AI and its platform has “always had AI,” Adams said.

“With the infrastructure of our platform with the different modelings and whatnot, we've been doing this for a long time,” she said. “Last year when we came out with Charlotte AI, it basically gave our managed services partners and the GSIs [and] also the customers a very simple way to automate and use AI to make their teams more efficient. During our symposium, I was actually talking with one of our Americas MSSP partners that leverages Charlotte, and they're having conversations with Charlotte as they're hunting within their customers' environments and it has made their teams so much more efficient that they've allocated essentially another person to more strategic items. When it comes to building up the roadmap, they don't have to spend hours looking for information. Charlotte has automated that, which is really cool that we're making it simple for folks literally to ask plain English questions and to expedite the efficiencies of the analysts and our customers.”

When it comes to feedback from partners, they’re most interested in innovation and profitability, Adams said.

“When they look at CrowdStrike, they want to understand how we are evolving with what the requirements are for customers,” she said. “So we're always solving for a specific use case. We get feedback on products when it comes to whether this is working well or this is what you need to tweak. And we have a very open line with our partners on communication. But partners are not going to sell or offer to their clients a solution which isn't driving innovation and CrowdStrike continues to do that. If you think about Charlotte, if you think of next-gen SIEM, that's been great feedback.”

CrowdStrike has driven partner profitability over the last two years, and partner feedback on that effort has been positive, Adams said.

“We're now very much focused on investing in services development, so the resources to support next-gen SIEM, but also we're making it profitable for partners to actually sell and work with CrowdStrike. So again, solving customer needs, making sure we're driving innovation and then making sure it's profitable for the partners," she said. "That's a winning combination.”

Adams said it’s important that partners walked away from the symposium understanding the “power” of the CrowdStrike platform and all the different options that are there for them and their customers.

“We have 28 modules,” she said. “That is overwhelming for all of our partners who sell hundreds of other technologies. They're not going to do everything, but they also need to understand the scope and the breadth of the CrowdStrike platform because their customers are consolidating onto the platform. We've had more customers buy eight or more modules on the platform, and so their understanding of, 'We could displace a vulnerability management (provider), if we could displace a Tanium, if we can displace a Palo Alto Networks with their SIEM, etc.,' that is a lot easier to sell. It's more strategic in nature to customers and partners. And they walked away this week with that understanding of all that we do, the breadth of and the power really of the platform when it comes to all of the different technologies.”

Adams hopes partners left the symposium with an understanding of where CrowdStrike continues to innovate and how they can drive innovation with the vendor.

“They're going to go back home and they're going to meet with their broader engineering teams, the sales teams, to say what can we do differently now versus the future to drive innovation with CrowdStrike?” she said. “Secondly, I want them to go back to their teams to say, 'How can we tweak where we're investing our time, our resources, but also our funding so that we're delivering secure outcomes for our customers and accelerating our partnership with CrowdStrike?' And then lastly, I want them to capitalize on the relationships they made with our executive teams, but also to take advantage and really build on that once-in-a generation partnership. If they make a decision to lean in with CrowdStrike today, they're going to deliver 10 times or 20 times what they're doing in the next one, two or three years with CrowdStrike. I've seen it happen with other partners, and I think that the partners and the executives in the room understand the opportunity that's in front of them. And so they take that message back to their teams to drive that urgency to get it going.”

Also during the symposium, CrowdStrike announced the winners of its inaugural CrowdStrike Americas Partner Awards.

“The power of the Falcon platform combined with the expertise of our partners is delivering unprecedented results for our customers,” Adams said. “Congratulations to our FY24 award winners. We look forward to another banner year working together to consolidate and simplify security across the Americas on our joint mission to stop breaches with the world’s leading cybersecurity platform.”

The 2024 CrowdStrike Americas Partner Awards winners include:

Also during the symposium, CrowdStrike announced the winners of its inaugural CrowdStrike Americas Partner Awards.

“The power of the Falcon platform combined with the expertise of our partners is delivering unprecedented results for our customers,” Adams said. “Congratulations to our FY24 award winners. We look forward to another banner year working together to consolidate and simplify security across the Americas on our joint mission to stop breaches with the world’s leading cybersecurity platform.”

The 2024 CrowdStrike Americas Partner Awards winners include: