 Good afternoon everyone. We're so glad that you're here with us on theCUBE. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante live, day one of our coverage of CrowdStrike Falcon 23. We've got a couple of great guest ones and alumni here to talk about partnerships in the ecosystem. Nick Keady joins us, the Chief Commerce Officer at PAX 8 and Daniel Bernard is here, the Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike. Guys, welcome back Daniel. Great to have you guys on the program. Thank you. Great to be here. Nick, start us off, give us a little bit of an overview about PAX 8 and its approach to cybersecurity. Yeah, PAX 8 is the cloud commerce marketplace that serves 30,000 MSSPs around the globe. So we are spending a lot of time enabling our community of MSSPs to serve their 500,000 customers that are inside of the PAX 8 ecosystem. Our partners have been asking for some time to deepen the vendor set that we have in the marketplace and they were asking by name for CrowdStrike. And so we are excited to finally be at the point where it's going to be in the marketplace in the coming weeks. That's outstanding. So you're really listening to the customers, the end users who demanded, it sounds like demanded fist on table CrowdStrike. Yes. So again, 30,000 partners, 500,000 customers, we are connected into those partners who are serving the ecosystem of SMB customers. So if you have heard George on the last couple earning calls talk about SMB is going to be big, partnerships are going to be big. PAX 8 is going to be delivering that solution, the CrowdStrike solution to SMB. Daniel, how did this all start? Take us through sort of the beginning and the journey. The way, way back machine. Way, way back. So PAX 8 has been growing and growing and growing over the last number of years. And I think as we look very strategically at the SMB marketplace, where are small, medium businesses buying the technology? How do they consume technology? That's in the midst of a revolution right now. Transformation revolution, call it what you want. More and more of them are using MSPs and MSSPs. Now, when you look at the smaller end of the business or as Nick affectionately calls the IBB. The itty bitty business. The itty bitty business. They're being served by MSPs, managed service providers. These MSPs don't necessarily have cybersecurity skills, but whether you're an MSP or you're an MSSP, you know that serving a small, medium business, you need to bring the best of greed technology from a cybersecurity perspective there because ransomware is all too common. This isn't a textbook type of situation where you learn about ransomware at a textbook. Read a newspaper, turn on the television. We can all certainly say having, right here where we are, there's lots of stuff going on in cybersecurity. So when it comes to how does a small business consume cybersecurity technology, it all comes back to MSPs helping solution, not just cybersecurity, but a broader set of technology needs. And that's where PAX 8 comes to really be the aggregator of that demand and help enable the partners to know what to do and then help enable them to deliver the right solutions like CrowdStrike to their customers at the right time. So I have a little trend analysis because small is different than mid. And especially, actually some small is kind of like mid, but IBB is definitely different than middle. A lot of IBBs don't even have IT. So what are some of the trends that you see and how are things evolving and think skate to the puck? Like what do you guys see out there and how does that inform your strategy? Yeah, the trends that I'm watching right now is the SMB buying behaviors looking more like consumer every single day. You used to be able to get away with not telling the customer, hey, you're secure, I'm your managed service provider, you're consultant and you're pro, just let me handle this. But now 68% of buyers are doing all of their research before they ever reach out to anybody. They've already made a buying decision. And so PAX 8 in our marketplaces, educating customers and educating partners on the right security solutions. And then we're helping those customers get matched made with the right vendor, CrowdStrike and the right managed service provider to meet their needs. Matchmaker. Yes. You talked about, you mentioned ransomware, it's a household word. It's obvious it's going on here right now in Las Vegas. Big difference. Especially here in Vegas, yeah. Especially here in Vegas, especially at this venue. Talk a little bit about, Nick, about some of the biggest challenges that PAX 8 is helping the partner ecosystem and its customers solve where this threat landscape is just so amorphous. Yes. I think number one is really just awareness. You used to be able to get away with just good enough. And I think now SMBs are being targeted at the same rate as enterprise customers and they deserve, they need required demand. I think you said earlier, the enterprise level software for their businesses. So we define SMB as sub 500, but of our 500,000 customers, the average size of them now is 31 employees. So they are asking for CrowdStrike by name and I'm excited to be able to deliver it. And I think just to add on that, there's very few products that just like ransomware is a household name, CrowdStrike is a household name. That there's very few products in enterprise technology or in technology in general that have that kind of brand power, that name recognition where people know CrowdStrike and they know that it stops the breach. And if you're a small media business and you've listened to satellite radio or you've read the news or your retail investor, how can you not know about CrowdStrike and see the outcomes of this company and what we've been able to achieve in cybersecurity and broader IT. And so it helps when you have a brand like that, you just have to then have the right technology for that and then have the right distribution mechanism and the right way to meet customers where they are. And that's really where this all comes together. Well, the advertising campaign has been very effective, right? Here, George, you know, CrowdStrike stops breaches. You hear his voice over and over and over. It's kind of rare in the cyber industry some of the AV guys advertise a little bit, but a copy CrowdStrike now. But it's been effective. I mean, you kind of get to know George a little bit even though people don't know him, but they kind of resonates and anybody who watches F1. Oh yeah. Just to see it right there, it's like strategically placed right next to the driver's head. We are prime for this market because we have that brand power. Of course, we have what the technology and we can talk about the technology in a second as well. But the messaging and what we do is simple. Very simple. And we don't expect a small and medium business or an itty bitty business to be a cybersecurity expert. I think if you go to trade shows or look around the booth here, there's a lot of great cybersecurity companies, but you need a PhD to understand what a lot of them do and how is it different than this? What does CrowdStrike do? We stop breaches, clean and simple. Drop the mic. I love that. Talk a little bit about, Daniel, the growth of the partner ecosystem in the last year. Dave was here last year covering the event and we were talking with JJ earlier. It's really, it's about a two X increase in the ecosystem. How, with Nixing, you know, PAX 8 partners and customers were coming to them demanding CrowdStrike, you know, some of the small, some of the itty bitties. Talk about the expansion of the ecosystem and how partners like this really helping you open more doors. Well, first I need to give a broad snapshot. We're one of the most successful channels in technology, not just cybersecurity. Over 160 partners doing more than $10 million in business with CrowdStrike. Over 360 partners that do more than 5 million in business with CrowdStrike. The technology has transformed how people do cybersecurity so therefore all the best and brightest partners, they want to win with CrowdStrike and bring us to market. We've invested a lot over the course of the past year in educational resources, 23 modules that just grew today to more. We have to help each one of our partners understand the platform, know how to position the platform, be incentivized to them with the platform, understand the differentiation. So that's on the education piece. There's also on the services component. There's a huge opportunity for partners of CrowdStrike to do services on our technology as well. So I think what the major takeaway is, is partners are doing more with CrowdStrike. The consolidation that the market is really pushing and necessitating that customers are asking for, that's happening in one place and it's happening on the Falcon platform. As go-to-market operators, how do you see or do you see AI changing the way go-to-market pros think about selling? You want to take it first? Absolutely. So we are seeing within our platform, again I talked about the number of partners, the number of customers. We're seeing a transaction happening every minute now across the 500,000 customers that we have. And so we are leveraging AI to suggest the next logical product, not that each partner should buy, but every single customer of every single partner, we're sending those insights to the partner, saying here is what this customer based on the data, their size, their geo, their industry, here's the next thing that they're going to want. We can either start dripping that to them through our marketplace, or we can start educating you to be able to deliver it to those customers. So we are leveraging AI today through our marketplace to match make customers and partners, and to then tell that partner the next logical product. And with 23 modules, now more, there's a lot of suggestions we could deliver that are by more crowd-strike. So is the BDR dead, or is the BDR just now supercharged? I think the BDR is supercharged. And I think the security operator, you know, I think George talked about it really nicely. We turned security analysts to security creators with Charlotte AI, because we'll come back to the world of Pakistan in a second, but just within our platform, how do we help more customers consume more of the platform? Charlotte AI puts it in their hands and does it for them. You don't need to be an advanced vulnerability management expert and have done vulnerability monitoring for years of your career now to be just as effective as somebody who has. And so this democratization effect, it's even more pronounced in the itty-bitty business where you want to ask questions and get answers. You want to tell somebody, I need to be secure. Am I secure from this? So we can really service the lowest common denominator, if you will, and democratize the technology in a whole new way. Back to your question, what this means for BDRs or people who go to market is you can pinpoint needs much more easier and you can go much faster. I mean, the small business opportunity is huge. I mean, what percent of small businesses have a sock? It's like single digits. I mean, none of them, so this is like awesome. And I would even think mid-sized companies, most mid-sized companies don't have a sock, maybe not most, but half. Yeah, that is the ecosystem we serve. Most of the customers within our ecosystem do not have internal IT. They're outsourcing that IT to MSPs and MSSPs. So excited about leveraging AI and the product knowledge that it delivers, you don't have to have that PhD as a managed service provider any longer if you have the recommendations that are coming from AI. Do MSSPs and MSPs come together or are they such distinct sort of practices that they'll stay separate? I think MSPs are on a journey to get that S and to become a specialized in security. They know that they can charge more for that premium service. MSPs tend to be more generalist and they know they can charge more per a user if they can get those specialties like CrowdStrike would get them. Yeah, so it's a transformation going on, yeah. Daniel, one of the things I know CrowdStrike talks about is delivering immediate time to value for customers and presumably partners as well. How do you define that? How do you measure that time to value? First it comes with, what is the first impression you have of the technology? And having a technology that is super simple, stupid easy to deploy, lightest weight agent on the market, no reboots required, we leave a really good first impression on the back of that. So while it takes hours, months, and sometimes even weeks to operationalize other technologies where you're setting exclusions, you have to do a whole bunch of configuration with CrowdStrike, it works out of the box and stops the breach. From there, all of these modules, each one of them has time to value indicators that we're able to surface through and with partners as well as to those customers. So it makes it really easy for ASISO on the large end to go back to a board or a CEO and say, this is why we use CrowdStrike, this is what it does for us, this is how it helps us stop the breach. Those are the kind of tools you need in a modern SaaS world because we're selling every single day of the year so that we get that renewal. We have to stop the breach, not just on Monday of the first day of the subscription, also on day 364 to make sure that we get the next one. And so it all comes down to, especially in this macro setup, what are you doing for me now? What are you doing for me tomorrow? Prove it and quantify it. What are the critical elements that make up a successful partnership like this and how do you guys manage it? How often do you meet your teams and what are the things that, I mean, obviously you're measuring revenue, but at the end of the day, that's what it's all about, but how do you ensure that those objectives are being met? Yeah, for us, the focus is, you talked about 160 partners in that first bucket, 300 plus in the second bucket, PAX 8 wants to deliver thousands and thousands and thousands of partners and their customer bases through this and we aggregate and we amplify the voice of those partners, and so we make it very easy to deliver reach, the amount of partners who are now buying crowd strike, frequency, how often are they adding new customers and then, of course, revenue or yield, but those are the three elements that we have to deliver. I think it's unique. I think DB and myself, we don't meet as often as we used to, but we're texting and talking at least once a week. Yeah, well, his team's grown a lot and my team's grown a lot, but I think it starts with trust. That's the beginning of every good partnership. You got to trust the technology. You also have to trust who you're working with. That's one. Two is, do you have a shared vision of what success looks like and our vision of what success looks like at CrowdStrike is really close to what PAX 8 has too, which is the SMB market is underserved. It's fundamentally underserved and not ready for what is happening in the world of cybersecurity. They see it in the numbers of the number of endpoints they have that still have legacy technologies. We know that from industry reports in our own install base. There's so much opportunity at the SMB size and what I think has been wrong with the SMB market until now is different medications have been prescribed for the same illness. Let me talk about that for a second. An SMB has the same cold that a large enterprise has, but how the doctor treats it is very different. And I think that's a fundamental problem. If you're a, it doesn't matter who you are, young, you need the same Tylenol. You just need to get the right dose. And what the industry has really struggled with over time is getting that dosage right. So what you've ended up with is a bifurcated model where you have a bunch of watered down products that no enterprise would ever buy. They wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole and that's what's been left for small and medium businesses. And it's a big problem because it doesn't work well. It just doesn't stop the breach. And then you have another class of technologies that are enterprise-grade. That model is flawed. We've got to get the dosage right. You still need the same efficacy. You need the same medication. We've got to stop the breach. We just need to do it in the right way and with the right partners to get to these 500,000 end customers that PAX 8 has. What are some of the things that we can expect next from PAX 8 and CrowdStrike better together? Yeah, I think the unique thing, the thing that PAX 8 can say with CrowdStrike that no one else can say is that based on the demand from the market, CrowdStrike has not had to make the product as consumable for SMB as it is going to be moving forward. Meaning sometimes the units that need to be sold individually to a customer was not approachable for an SMB customer, somebody with 10 or 25 people in their company. And so PAX 8 is going to be one of the only places to get less than 200 licenses and not have to pay upfront for the entire year. It's going to be the place for SMB customers to come in a way that is consumable and get enterprise-grade technology that they had not had access to before. If you build it three times. We're in the early innings of this partnership. We announced just a couple months ago the global reach they have. The kind of growth they're seeing in these international markets. I mean, this isn't just an America's partnership. This is a worldwide partnership. The journeys that we can take our customers on together with all these different modules. What you have to expect is global expansion, more platform adoption, and watch us design partner new innovative technologies that solve problems for these customers. That's the kind of relationship we have. Love it. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on the program talking about the partnership, the value in it, within it for both of you and the ecosystem and the customers. We really appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks a lot. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live. Day one of our coverage of CrowdsQuest.com 23 Instagram. Next guest joins us in just a minute. Time like we're small talking. That was very good.