 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Falcon 23, live from Caesars Palace. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. You can hear the buzz behind us. Lots of folks here. The keynote was standing your moment. We just got to see that. George Kurtz, who's coming on the program with Dave later on today. About 4,000 attendees, 7th annual Falcon. We are so pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, Jennifer Johnson, the Chief Marketing Officer at CrowdStrike, or otherwise known as JJ. How are you? Good to have you here. Oh my gosh, thank you for being here. This is amazing. Falcon 2023 is here, and it's our biggest and best one yet. Awesome, so a lot of buzz. The event theme, the future of cybersecurity, starts here, a lot of news and announcements. Jam-packed keynote this morning. Talk to us a little bit about your, as CML, your objectives for the event. What is it that you want your customers and your partners to take away? Absolutely. So George actually talked about it on stage today, that a lot of the founding principles of CrowdStrike was to be the platform for cybersecurity, just as Salesforce, for example, to be the Salesforce of cybersecurity. So when we think about Falcon, it's only natural then to be the dream force of cybersecurity. So for those of you who know Dreamforce, you understand what it is. It really is kind of the center of the universe for that industry and bringing the whole ecosystem and the whole community together to learn and shape the future and get inspired and get educated. And that's really what we really thought about as a marketing team this year putting on Falcon, is how do we build the dream force of cybersecurity? So I think we're doing a pretty good job. I think you are too. You know, when we were doing our analysis at the end of last year at Falcon, we said one of the things we want to see is that the ecosystem to grow, because if CrowdStrike's going to be a platform company, they've got to grow that ecosystem. And then I saw the press release that you had 70 plus exhibitors, which is, I mean, it's got to be close to double, maybe two thirds bigger than it was last year. So well done. Pretty soon you keep growing, you're going to be at Moscone. That's right. I mean, we actually talked about it. We had, I think about 30 partners last year. So you're right, over two X number of partners this year, over 100% growth of our attendance and registration. Overall, we have, as you said, 4,000 people here. And we're already going to grow out of this space this year. We will be back in Vegas next year. I don't think we've announced the location, but we will be back in Vegas somewhere next year. But even after that, we will have to probably go to a convention center. I don't know if it will be Moscone, but you're right. Or the Venetian. Or the Venetian, that's right. That's a good problem to have, especially as you have a lofty goal to be the dream force of cybersecurity. Talk a little bit about, as the threat landscape has changed so dramatically, obviously recent current events hitting Las Vegas, how has the mission and the vision of CrowdStrike evolved and adapted to really help find those adversaries and get more defense in the hands of the good guys? It's such a good question. And actually our mission has stayed the same since day one. So the company, of course, we evolve, our technology evolves, but this notion of we stop breaches and I'm actually looking at it right now on the wall, that isn't something we just, I mean it's on the wall, but it's not something that just goes on the wall that we forget about. We live it and breathe it every single day and that's how we drive our decisions. That's how we build our technology. And as George said this morning, you don't have a malware problem. You have an adversary problem. And really everything we do is all centered around understanding the adversary, understanding predicting their next steps, staying ahead of them and everything we do is around stopping the breach. And so as we evolve, I mean our technology has to evolve. AI obviously is the topic of the year, anywhere you go. It obviously was a topic this morning, but AI, it can be used for bad and it can be equally used for good. And so that's a really big focus of us is how do we think about building AI into our technology and the power of the platform and the data that we've collected. I mean we've been doing AI since day one, right? We've built AI into our platform since the beginning. How do you take and harness all that data and be able to look at it and drive and understand the patterns and actually use that to predict future behavior and stop breaches. Now we're just going on the next path of the AI journey which is generative AI. And then how do you use that to actually help upskill every analyst to become? I mean, did you see that? I don't know if you saw the keynote this morning. Charlotte AI keynote. Yes, that was fantastic. I mean, imagine what George was showing on stage that literally would take a team of analysts days, weeks, I mean maybe even months to go through all of that of what she actually was able to surface in a matter of seconds. And I mean that's going to transform. We think about really the revolutionary innovations in technology over the last 30 years. I mean AI really has the power to be as, it will be as disruptive as the commercial introduction of the internet was. And so we need to be at the forefront of how do we actually use it for good? You're going fast is obviously a big theme. You had, you know, Lewis Hamilton up on stage telling jokes, the car's here, it's amazing. George loves to drive fast. The other thing too is just walking around last night around the exhibit hall. I was struck by the number of companies that I talked to, smaller companies that CrowdStrike has invested in. And so there's a lot of innovation going on and then to your point about Charlotte AI, I mean, George I think said eight hours, he's trying to take eight hours down to eight minutes. That demo was really impressive. I mean, it was actually faster than chat GPT itself. And the amount of information that it was culling through. So you guys got to be pretty excited about that. That is going to completely change the way in which SecOps teams operate, you know, at high velocity. And then of course I'm sure the adversaries will come up with something else. But what is it about that speed theme that you're trying to bring forward and tie it with your innovation? Yeah, so we talk a lot about breakout time. I think when I started a year ago, we track breakout time. How long does it take the adversary to actually get in and infiltrate a system? It was I think 84 minutes last year when we issued our global threat report, which was down from the previous year. And six months later, we tracked it again and it was down to I think 79 minutes now. And it is an average, right? I mean, in some cases it is really minutes that they can actually get in. And so we actually have to stay a step ahead of that, right? And AI is going to help us transform that time to actually be able to stay a step ahead and do things at lightning speed. And, you know, we talk about if it's going to take you days, weeks, months to be able to understand where the adversary is, have they moved laterally, the damage is already done. And so it really is about speed and staying ahead. And I think that's what the combination of what you can do with AI to actually be able to go through a large amount of data to be able to get the answer. So you ask the question, you get that answer in seconds, but it doesn't stop there. The automation is really the third piece of it is to be able to take action and close that loop. Finding something is great, but if you can't actually fix it, well, it's as good as not finding it in the first place. And so the automation piece and what we can do with our platform, we have a workflow engine, Falcon Fusion, which actually helps build the workflows. Now imagine this if you actually could ask Charlotte a question, get an answer, and then actually have her build an automated workflow to fix the problem. And then you now you have that as a library. And so that is when you start thinking about the platform together and putting AI and data and automation together, it is beyond, it's at another level, right? And if we think about that in Falcon Foundry was one of the other things that we announced today, you know, we will do that as part of our platform, but we want to bring the power of the platform and put it in the hands of every security and IT team. Imagine now all of a sudden their creators, their innovators, their developers in a way, without having to be a developer, they can actually build a workflow and then they have it and they can share it. I mean, that really is what a platform is, right? That Foundry announcement was interesting. So George was up on stage and he said, I'm always asked how many, I think, I think, I guess what, 23 modules now? Yeah. And George says, I'm always asked how many modules are you going to create? Then he put up an infinity sign. I'm like, where's he going with this? And he said, infinite. And then he announced Falcon Foundry, which is your ability to create sort of custom bespoke workflows with low code. So that really does put you into, I mean, a little bit of an application development platform or I guess a workflow development platform. Absolutely. Which opens you up to an infinite number of your custom modules. So he kind of got me there. At first I was like, oh, this is BS. But then, okay. The only limit is your imagination, really. If you can do it with the data and you can build the workflow on top of it, really, it is infinite. So it's very exciting. One of the things that I found exciting and that I thought, I love bold marketing, I noticed that you guys have a comparison page on the website that's actually, and you never see that stuff as public. Most companies have competitive intelligence and it's something that product or marketing does and it's used for sales calls or whatnot. You guys are out there saying it. I love that. What are, in your opinion, and you've been here a year now, some of the key differentiators that really set crowd-strike apart from your competition. Absolutely. Well, first and foremost, we do want to make sure that people understand how we're different. So putting things out there as comparisons, not why we're better. I mean, you can be better, but it doesn't stop there how we think about things differently. I think that's really important in a very noisy space that we call cybersecurity. I mean, every market's very crowded. This one, I think, is probably at the end, at the end of the spectrum in terms of everybody sounds the same. So it's our job as marketers to actually help the people who are buying the technology, all the people here at the conference who are trying to figure out, well, is it this or this, and what does this one do versus what does that one do? We actually have, I believe, we have a responsibility as marketers to not make it more confusing because we've done that as an industry and we need to stop that. So that's first and foremost why I believe in that as a marketer. But if we kind of come back to it, really the kind of the first thing I'd say is the knowledge of the adversary. We started this company as a threat intel and then endpoint detection and response company. We understand the adversary not only because we have this cloud scale technology built in so we have a deep understanding, but we have the human expertise alongside of it. And that is a real differentiator for us. It's not just the machine learning and the machine automation, but it's that human validated content by our threat intelligence team, our threat hunting team. We just recently announced counter-adversary operations was a combination of our threat intelligence experts and our threat hunting experts that are really out there and they're going and hunting for those things that the machine maybe can't find on its own, they're validating it, they're finding new things and then they're building all of that knowledge back into the platform. So when you have that combination of machine plus human together, that's a real differentiator for us. And it's really a consolidation. We talk about it as an industry, platform consolidation seems to be the kind of one of the buzzwords of the year, but it's a real thing. And consolidation isn't just about consolidation for consolidation's sake and it's not just about I get a single invoice from a single vendor, although there are values to that too and we announced some great enterprise pricing with Falcon Flex this morning as well around helping customers adopt and consolidate with us easier. But it's really about how do you take that unified platform, unified agent? So we talk a lot about the single lightweight agent. Well, that's really beneficial because the more agents you put on your machines, the more performance issues there are, the more data that they collect in silos. So we're all about collect it once and reuse it many. That's our data advantage. And so that single agent is the foundation of the platform, right? And then we talk about the building the power of the cloud. We weren't an on-premise product that figured out how to become a cloud platform. We actually built cybersecurity in the cloud. All the advantages you get with the cloud, the scale, the data, being able to build AI into it. All of that is inherent in what we do. And then you build modules on top, right? And so it's one console, it's one workflow. You can have an infinite number of use cases but all on that single platform. And so we talk about point tools and disjointed tools, but it's real. I mean, most security teams have 45, 50 plus different security tools. If we can help make everybody's lives easier, less complex, less costly, a lot easier with the speed and the intelligence that we build in, that's better outcome. That's why you consolidate. It's a good time to be a platform player because if you have a platform, you can be a consolidator. It's clearly working for you. Zscalers, another one, Palo Alto obviously is gaining share and there are a lot of what George calls shared donors. I wanted to ask you a question in marketing. How are you using as a marketer? How are you using AI? It's a good question. So it's interesting because with every new technology, it really is the innovators dilemma. You see the early, it was fascinating to watch it in the marketing team because there were parts of the marketing team that just dove right in and they went in there and they were building content. A lot of it is content, right? How do you, you can build white papers, you can build data sheets, you can build competitive documents really easily through it and literally in seconds. I mean, I know everyone's probably played around with ChatGPT at this point, but it is pretty revolutionary. So we had teams that were like in there talking to our legal team about, okay, what are the privacy, I mean, they were already going into like, how do we think about this from a data privacy perspective? And then there were teams within the marketing team that maybe put their head in the sand a little bit on it and didn't want to acknowledge that what was coming and like, I mean, it's natural. That's with every new technology that you're going to get everyone in them. And I think it'll follow the natural curve, right? You've got the early adopters that jump right in. You've got the others that kind of, you know, begrudgingly will follow along and then you have the laggards. But I think a lot of what we're seeing and a lot of what my marketing peers are really seeing is I think the first really big use case for marketing is around content creation. And that's not just, you know, white papers and data sheets, it's emails, it's how do you actually, you know, you can, I mean, have you played around, I'm sure you've played around with ChatGPT. Oh, everday. It's pretty amazing. I mean, you can tell it like, talk to this persona, use this kind of tone. I mean, it's, and it does a pretty good job. It does. I mean, you need to edit it. You need to edit it. You know, put your own, you know, imprint on it. It's amazing to get started and give you the first draft. That's the key thing. It's not a complete like turnkey solution, right? But it's about, yeah, it's about giving you a baseline. Then you kind of build the art. So it gives you what I call, there's art and there's science. It gives you the science, right? And then you have to put your own flair and your own art on it. ChatGPT could not do this. How about that? No, exactly. Last question, we've only got about 30 seconds left. How do you take this event over the next few days and scale it across the globe? What, how are you getting that message out to all those who aren't here in person? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, up until now, this really has been our, you know, it's our flagship, our events. What I'd love to see us do and what we will be doing, so stay tuned on that, is how do we make this our yearly flagship event and then how do we bring this out on the road across around the globe, right? So we have, we have customers here from every region around the globe, but we want to bring the power of our message and this experience to everyone. So stay tuned on that. All right, JJ, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program. Sharing the differentiators, what's going on, kind of helping to unpack some of the news. We'll let you go. We know you're super busy, but great. Thank you for kicking off the cubes coverage. Oh, I'm so fat. I'm so glad you're here. This is one of my favorite parts of Falcon, so thank you. Oh, I love it. Thank you so much. For JJ and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Falcon 23 at Caesar's Palace. We'll be right back with our next guest, Salesforce, the protector of the year. You won't want to miss it.