 Welcome back to Falcon 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here with my co-host, Dave Nicholson. On the last earnings call, George Kurtz made a really big emphasis on the relationship with managed service providers. CrowdStrike has announced a new service provider capability, the powered service provider program. Jason Cooke is here. He's the president of Cyber Defense Labs. He's joined by Mike Riola, who's the vice president of global system integrators and service providers at CrowdStrike Gents. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Jason, tell us about Cyber Defense Labs. What do you guys do? Give us the bumper sticker, please. Cyber Defense Labs uses the best technology in the world to put together services that help protect our clients. Simple. Like it. What's XDR? So. I've not heard of that before, sorry. So, Mike, we've seen the rise of service providers. I saw a stat, I don't know, six, seven months ago that 50% of US companies don't even have a SOC. We're talking about mid to large companies. So, service providers are crucial. What's the CrowdStrike powered service provider program all about? Well, it's an evolution for us. We've been dealing with this market for some time. And the idea is, is like, how do we expand the opportunity to stop reaches? I mean, that's what it's all about. Like, more routes to market, more partners like Cyber Defense Labs that can really go in and bring our technology coupled with their services to power their offerings to their customers. And just help us reach every end user out there to stop reaches. So, Jason, how do you guys differentiate? Because I see, as an analyst, I'll look back. I'll read the press releases and they'll see, okay, they just look so similar. So, how do you differentiate from the competition? What do you tell customers? So, when it comes to our selection of technology, we test it, we work it, we literally put it into real-world situations with our clients. And then, we differentiate ourselves with expert services. It's a white glove service from us. We embed ourselves right in with our clients. That's why we call them our client partners. And they see us as part of their team, an extension of their team. They don't have the time to play with technology and work out what's best. They don't have the time to select it or even then the expertise to use it effectively in their environment. So, that's where the trust comes in with us. And then for us, likewise, where the technology provider such as CrowdStrike, we need to know the technology works and it does what it says. I always ask CISOs, what's your number one challenge? And they'll say lack of talent. The only time I didn't get that answer was at the MongoDB CISO at Reinforce. I'm like, yeah, it's because you're a Mongo, or I guess Reinforce. AWS doesn't have the same problem, but obviously you see that problem. And you compliment that. Is that a fair way to think about it? Yeah, absolutely. Many companies, mid-market enterprises are really struggling to find talent. And then retain the talent. So for us, that's all we're about. And then we're there to enable your business to do what your business does. It is just working. And I think more and more so, you're going to see an industry clearly, CrowdStrike's going in that direction, that it's the service provider that becomes a critical element of that trusted circle. Does that translate into a market segment by size of organization, typically? Or you mentioned the ever never-ending quest for talent, which is critical, regardless of size. But what does your target market look like? So I think the biggest gap in the market, frankly, is still the mid-market. Many smaller companies still are really just struggling with what is the problem. At least in the mid-market and the enterprises, they really begin to understand the problem and want to invest and lean in. And here's the irony, they now want to partner to solve the problem because they recognize they can't do it on their own. So, Mike, what are the critical aspects of this program? I mean, got the press release out there, but put some meat on the bone for us. So if you look at what we were doing to enable managed service providers to go in and be powered by CrowdStrike before, it was in a corporate market segment, it was a specific set of product from us to really enable MDR, sort of that generation of services that a lot of customers looked at MSSPs for. And what the big message about this is, is we are now expanding that. We're taking it out of corporate, we're going up-market, we're going enterprise, we can leverage partners like Cyber Defense Labs to package our software into their offering and help them power them more than just in point. We've had a lot of exciting announcements and probably more to come around identity, XDR, the new buzz, right? Like what does it mean? And if you look at our approach, it's a very platform-centric approach. And that's something that partners can monetize, that's something that partners can really help clients grow with, is that it's not just about in point, it's more about how do I make sure that I'm in a position with a partner that allows me to grow as the market decides it's necessary. So things like identity, cloud, on and on and on, that we're investing in and continue to grow, we're making that available to the CrowdStrike-powered service-bounder marketplace. So Jason, service providers historically outsourcing, okay, and it used to be a lot of, okay, I'll take over your mess for less kind of thing, right? And so, the pattern was you would have one of everything. And then that limited your scale, the bigger you had this economies of scale. So am I hearing that, how do you partner with CrowdStrike? Are you kind of standardizing on that platform or not necessarily because you have to be agnostic? What's your posture on that? So there's a level of you have to be technology agnostic. We pride ourselves in just using the best technology that's out there. But at the same time, very much with the Falcon platform, they're building out and maturing in a way that's making significant risk mitigation abilities for a solution provider like us to say we'll take one of those, one of those and put our service around it because that's the best fit service to reduce the risk of this particular client. And having that flexibility for us to do that really allows us then to stay within the same sort of product suite rather than going outside when integration is still one of the biggest challenges that you have. So you're one of those organizations that's consolidating a bevy of point tools, is that right? I mean, you're going through that transformation now. Have you already gone through that? What's your journey look like there? We help companies do that. That's how they mitigate and reduce their risk. Okay, but you're using tools as well, are you not? So I mean, you've got to also, I mean, you're like an extension of those clients. Absolutely, so it comes down to a lot of the time, do you have the right team? We have a team of experts that deliver expert services. You get to a level of skill set and experience which goes, what's just the best tool out there? And it becomes, that's our insight. So one of the reasons why we like the Falcon product is because regardless of what the mess is that's happening, you can rapidly deploy stuff to make a difference and then you then work out how to fix the mess, which is quite a change from how traditionally things are done, which is let's analyze the problem, let's look at options around it, and by the time you've done that, time has passed and you can't afford to just allow time to pass these days, so having the right technology allows you to rapidly deploy. Of course, we use what we sell, so we're proud to say that we use a number of the Falcon products to protect ourselves and consolidate onto that technology as we then offer that out as a service to our clients. So Mike, I'm thinking about the program in general and specifically how you are implementing this program, thinking about the path to bringing a customer on board. There are a finite number of strategic seats at any customer's table, so who is at the customer's table? Is it CDL saying, hey, I'm going to bring in my folks from CrowdStrike to have a conversation with you? Is it CrowdStrike saying, hey, it looks like a service provider might be the best solution for you, let's go talk to CDL, how does that work? It's a great question and I think we talk a lot about how there's a gap in people to support cyber efforts inside of companies, but we don't talk about the gap in experts that can go in and actually sit down with CISOs, with CIOs, with CFOs. And so for us, it's all about the flexibility. It's what do you need in the moment because at the end of the day it comes down to the people. If Jason has a great trust to relationship, he's like, hey, I just need some content, help me push why we're powered by CrowdStrike in this moment. Great, go run. If we have an opportunity where we know that Cyber Defense Labs has a presence, then we go in together. That flexibility is there. We've done a lot. When you build a program like this, it's easy to tell the market what they need. It's easy to tell everybody, but it's also, you're looking at a cultural shift in how CrowdStrike goes to market. This is all about how do we get every possible route to market to stop reaches for customers of all size. I would echo that. There's three ways that's working for our two companies at the moment. Many times a lot of the relationships that we have are trusted advisor at the owner or board level of these mid-market and enterprise companies. They're looking to ask for a number of things. And one of the things that we then say is, hey, for your technology roadmap, hey, we want to bring in code present, code discuss, code strategize with you what your roadmap is. And so we often bring CrowdStrike into the conversations that Cyber Defense Lab is having at the board level. Then on the other side, CrowdStrike obviously has a significant sales force and trusted advisors. They go in with the product and then it's apparent that the client wants way more than just the product. They say, this is great. I love it. I've made my decision, but I can't operate it effectively. And so we then get pulled in from that perspective. You get this all the time from product companies, right? It's like, okay, now what, how do I do this? And you go, oh, I'll call somebody. So this is going to accelerate. You go to market. And everybody looks at it like, how does your sales play with their sales, right? Everyone's going after the same thing. And I'm, you know, that's important. But you have to look at CrowdStrike as more than sales, right? We have an amazing threat intel group that are helping clients understand the risk factors and what bad people are trying to do to them. We can bring so many experts to the side of a cyber defense labs in that realm. You know, we've been doing this a long time. This is what's interesting to me when I think about your threat hunting, because you guys are experts and you guys are experts. But the, it's correct me if I'm wrong, but the advantage I see of the CrowdStrike has is your cloud platform allows you to have such a huge observation space. You got a ton of data and you bring that to the relationship as well. And then you benefit from that. It's two way. It's absolutely two way. CrowdStrike has a whole bunch of experts and expertise in this space. So the cyber defense labs, we call it for us because we're providing a service to multiple clients. Many of them have a global presence. We call it our global threat view. And absolutely we're exchanging real time threat telemetry data with our friends at CrowdStrike, which is impacting the value that we have and the ability to respond extremely quickly when something's happening to one of our clients. So sounds good, please. Well, I just add to that that, you know, if you look at all of our alliances, right? We've got solution providers, tech reliance, everything. The one thing that's really interesting about the CrowdStrike Powered Service Provider program, it lives in alliances. It's a partnership program, but they're our customer. They have chosen to standardize on our platform, right? To help drive the best results for their customers. And so we treat them like a partner because it's not for internal use. There's unlimited aspect to it. And so as that treating like partnership, we have to enable them with more than just product, right? We want to bring the right experts. We want to bring the right, you know, vision of where the market's going, the threats out there, things of that nature. And that's something that we do every day with you guys. And it was even expressed earlier with the keynote speech that George gave. Look, there's an ecosystem of very good technologies, very good providers. And there's that sort of frenemy view here. You put the best thing together for the client at the end of the day. And if we all acknowledge, which I think is the maturity of our partnership, that one plus one equals, I always say, at 51 now. If you play it right, then the client sees the value of the partnership. And so they want more of that. So it sounds like we had a rap, but I wonder if we could close on this. It sounds like this was happening just organically in the field. Now you've codified it. So my question to each of you is, what's your vision for the future? Where do you guys want to take this thing? What a rap question right there. I love it. Honestly, like we look at it in, look at what does it mean to be a CrowdStrike powered service provider? It is more than just the platform. It's the program in general, offering them tools to go in and do early assessments. One thing about service providers, they're in there before vendors, right? We're still a vendor at the end of the day. And so they have that relationship. Like how do we enable them to leverage our platform, leverage our tools, leverage our programs in order to help a client understand like what is your risk factor? Could a breach come? Things of that nature. And so it's really building and really enabling a partner like Cyber Defense Labs to take on the full suite of programs, services, platform that we can provide to them as a customer, treated like a partner. And Jason, from your perspective, bring us on if you would. So our partnership with CrowdStrike is really enabling Cyber Defense Labs to increase our share of wallet, our presence in very specific market segments. The mid-market to enterprise, especially around banking, financial services, auto dealerships, healthcare, manufacturing, where last year we saw a significant progress there and we think we're going to double it between this year and next year. Jason Cook, Mike Riola, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great story. Thank you for having us. Thank you. All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson will be back right after this short break from Falcon 22. You're watching theCUBE.