Working with the best to be the best: CrowdStrike’s partner focus in 2025

“This is cybersecurity's biggest party. We're on this journey to US$10 billion in annual recurring revenue, with plenty of opportunity and time,” says Daniel Bernard, CrowdStrike’s Chief Business Officer.

CrowdStrike remains a dominant player in cybersecurity as it continues to grow its presence in the Asia Pacific region. Despite a major challenge faced in 2024, the cybersecurity vendor recorded a total revenue of US$3.95 billion for fiscal 2025, a 29% increase, compared to US$3.06 billion in fiscal 2024.

On July 19th, 2024, a single content update from CrowdStrike caused more than 8.5 million systems to crash, disrupting operations for days across thousands of organizations worldwide, including major organizations in the Asia Pacific region.

Since then, the cybersecurity vendor has grown stronger, proving that they’re capable of providing the best services to customers. As Daniel Bernard, CrowdStrike’s Chief Business Officer, clearly points out in an interview with CRN Asia, the company’s financials for 2024 clearly indicate that customers are still engaged and relying heavily on CrowdStrike in cybersecurity.

“We emerged as an even stronger company, even closer to our customers and even closer to our partners. The partners didn't miss a beat. They stayed with us the whole time and they grew their businesses. I think what's interesting is that we saw a lot of others in the market say a lot of things. All those things ended up becoming proven to be either untrue or backfiring as our business has grown and their businesses haven't,” commented Bernard.

Bernard also mentioned that 60% of CrowdStrike’s business in the past years have come from partners. He added that customers are resolutely staying and growing with CrowdStrike, with a 97% gross retention recorded. For Bernard, this also goes down to the relationship they’ve built with their partners over the years.

“No other vendor in cybersecurity offers the opportunity, no other vendor in cybersecurity offers the profitability, no other vendor in cybersecurity offers the kind of enablement and services opportunity that we do,” said Bernard.

Building the partner ecosystem

Echoing Bernard’s sentiments is Jon Fox, VP of Channels, Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) at CrowdStrike. Fox shared that the partner business has grown tremendously over the last three years in Asia Pacific region and that CrowdStrike doesn’t struggle to bring on more partners.

“We are quite selective with who we partner with, and we make sure that we have the right partners to ensure that we deliver the right outcomes to the customers. For me, when I think about the right partner, I want a partner to have a perspective. I don't want them to have a menu card of 30, 40 different vendors and leave it to the customer to choose. I want a partner to have a perspective, and that perspective should be CrowdStrike. I then want to partner with partners who want to invest, who want to build service capability around our Falcon platform and around our other modules, and deliver that overall outcome to the customer,” explained Fox in the interview as well.

For partners, Fox pointed out that the biggest challenge faced is choosing the right vendor they want to focus on as partners can have as many technologies as they want on their line card. The second challenges partners face is how can they work with customers in a very dynamic macro and economic environment to be able to move business forward.

“Our Falcon Flex licensing subscription model really differentiates the CrowdStrike offering from everybody else. We're able to tee off and get everything done on the procurement side and on the legal side and then set the partners on the journey of helping the customer be successful with the technology,” explained Fox.

As partners are best in helping customers get the most out of the technology, Fox also believes it’s a really good time to be a partner in cybersecurity especially since AI is not only accelerating the threat landscape but is also making the technologies better and more relevant for the attack landscape.

“It’s the right time to be a partner in cybersecurity if you're aligned with the right technology, and that technology is the Falcon platform,” added Fox.

At CrowdStrike’s recently concluded APJ Partner Symposium in Taiwan, the cybersecurity vendor also announced updates to its Accelerate program which it believes will now be more specialized and tailored towards different partner types.

During the Partner Symposium, CrowdStrike also announced winners of the annual CrowdStrike APJ Partner Awards. Sekuro Operations Pty Ltd (pictured below) was awarded APJ Partner of the Year while Nexus Technologies was awarded the MSSP of the Year for APJ. AWS was also recognized as Technology Alliance Ecosystem Partner of the Year at the ceremony.

Partner growth in APAC

With Asia Pacific being a very diverse region, Fox also highlighted that there are still a lot of countries whereby CrowdStrike has not overly penetrated. This addressable market is up for the taking and is also an area that they would like partners to be aggressive in.

“We want partners to come to us with what they need to help them go after that market. We're a very aggressive business and we like new ideas. We're open to anything that our partners come to us with to go and get that growth,” said Fox.

Bernard added that it's also critical for partners to understand the FalconFlex program, especially on how it can help customers and how partners can leverage it not just from a sales perspective but around the module adoption.

“A big part of the FalconFlex program is how the customer adopts these modules over a period of time. Our partners need to help us have those customers utilize the FalconFlex contract,” said Bernard.

Fox also mentioned that more partners will be utilizing crowd marketplaces like AWS Marketplace and Google Marketplace as well invest in building next-gen SIEM transformation services.

“There's room for everybody in the crowd. And this is cybersecurity's biggest party. We're on this journey to US$10 billion in annual recurring revenue. There’s plenty of opportunity and plenty of time. It's not too late to start working with CrowdStrike and there's a lot of opportunity across the board in every single capability of our 29 modules” added Bernard.

With CrowdStrike looking to work with the best in cybersecurity, they also believe that the best in cybersecurity will want to work with them. As Bernard puts it, CrowdStrike is the number one product that partners are being asked about in the market and it’s a testament to their success and relationship they have with partners.

“It’s the kind of position we have in the market and the kind of position we have with the partners that work with us. And there’s plenty of opportunity. We’ve got more billions to go. So, we need the best partners to work with us, and we want to work with them,” concluded Bernard.