Channel underpinning Crowdstrike Q2 growth

Crowdstrike has seen its subscription sales improve in its second fiscal quarter with the channel accredited with helping to drive sales.

The firm chose to stop working with distribution back in January 2018 and has focused on developing a single-tier approach with its Elevate Partner Program, which was revamped at the start of this year.

Those that wondered how the vendor would fare without distribution might be interested to hear the comments from the security player's CEO George Kurtz on the earnings call.

Not only was he able to talk about increasing subscription rates for its Falcon platform, with 50% of customers now taking four or more cloud modules from the vendor, with 730 new customers in the quarter, ended 31 July.

He was also able to talk about revenues of $108.1m, that increased 94% year-over-year, and subscription revenue was up by 98%, coming in an $97.6m.

"There is a tremendous amount of interest across all partner channels, whether it's OEM, whether it’s traditional partners, whether it's cloud partners, because we're leading technology. So we spend a lot of time and we try to be very thoughtful in how we go to market and how we partner and we're going to continue to do that," he said.

He added that the channel was being asked by users to offer the vendor's technology and that was also driving more interest from resellers.

"If you go out into the marketplace, the customers are asking their partners, whether it's a hardware vendor, whether it's a traditional reseller, whether it's cloud service provider, whether it's managed service provider, the partners are being asked about CrowdStrike," said Kurtz.

"I've had a lot of meetings with the SIs and there's just tremendous pull for us. So again, we're going to be thoughtful in how we go to market, but suffice to say, there's a lot of demand. And when the customers are asking for it, that's really when these partners take shape, and you see the traction in the field together," he added.