 Okay, we're back at Falcon 2022, CrowdStrike's big user conference, first time in a couple years, obviously, because of COVID. This is theCUBE's coverage. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, wall-to-wall coverage, two days in a row. Michael Rogers is here, he's the newly minted Vice President of Global Alliances at CrowdStrike. Michael, first of all, congratulations on the new appointment, and welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, it's an honor to be here. So dial back just a bit. I can think about your first 100 days in this new role. What was it like, who'd you talk to, what'd you learn? Wow, well, the first 100 days were filled with excitement. I would say 18 plus hours a day, getting to know the team across the globe, wonderful team across all of the partner types that we cover, and just digging in and spending time with people and understanding what the partner needs were, and it was just, it was a blur but a blast, I agree. Were there any common patterns that you heard that you could sort of coalesce around? Yeah, I mean, I think that really what a common thing that we hear at CrowdStrike, whether it's internal or external, is getting to the market as fast as possible. There's so much opportunity, and every time we open a door, the resource investment, we continue to invest in resources, and that was an area that we identified and quickly pivoted and started making some of those new investments in a structure of the organization, how we cover partners, how we optimize the different routes to market with our partners, and yeah, just, it's been a wonderful experience, and in my 25 years of cybersecurity, actually 24 and a half as of Saturday, I can tell you that I have never felt and had a better experience in terms of culture, people, and a greater mission for our customers and our partners. Yo, Max, funny, a lot of times, Dave, we talk about this, we learned a lot from Amazon, AWS with the cloud, taking something you did internally, pointing it externally, two pizza teams, this shared responsibility model, we talk about that, and one of the other things is blockers. Amazon uses that term blockers, so were there any blockers that you identified that you're sort of working with the partner ecosystem to knock down, to accelerate that go-to-market? Well, I mean, if I think about what we had put in place prior, and I had the benefit of being Vice President of America prior to the appointment, and had the pleasure of succeeding my dear friend and mentor, Matthew Pauley, a lot of that groundwork was put in place, and we work collectively as a leadership team to knock down a lot of those blockers, and I think it really, as I came into the opportunity, and we made new investments going into the fiscal year, it's really getting to market as fast as possible. It's a massive target addressable market, and identifying the right routes and how to harness that power of we to drive the most value to the marketplace. Yeah, what does that look like in terms of alliances? Alliances can take a lot of shape. We've talked to service providers today, as an example. Are global systems integrators in that group also? What does the range look like? Yeah, I mean, alliances at CrowdStrike, and it's a great question because a lot of times people think alliances and they only think of technology alliances, and for us, it spans really any and all routes to market. It could be your traditional solution providers, which might be regionally focused. It could be nationally focused, larger solution providers or LARS. As you noted, service providers and telcos, global system integrators, MSSPs, IoT partners, OEM partners, and CrowdStrike store partners. So, you look across that broad spectrum and we cover it all. So, the MSSPs, we heard a lot about that on the recent earnings call. We've heard it, this is a consistent theme. We've interviewed a couple here today. What's driving that? I mean, is it the fact that CISOs are just, you know, drowning for talent? And why CrowdStrike? Why is there such an affinity between MSSPs and CrowdStrike? Yeah, a great question. We, and you noted that succinctly, that CISOs today are faced with a number one challenge is lack of resources and cybersecurity. The last stat I heard was, you know, in the hundreds of thousands, like 350,000, and that's an old stat. So, I would venture to guess that the open positions in cybersecurity are north of a half a million as we sit here today. And service providers and MSSPs are focused on providing service to those customers that are understaffed and have that personnel need. And they are harnessing the CrowdStrike platform to bring a cloud native best of breed solution to their customers, to augment and enhance the services that they bring to those customers. So, I understand you did this partner survey. Tell us about the, I love surveys. I love data, you know this. What was the genesis of the survey? Who took it? Give us the breakdown. Yeah, that's a great question. Nothing is more important than the feedback that we get from our partners. So, every single year we do a partner survey. It reaches all partner types in the ecosystem. And we use a net promoter score model. And so, we look at ourselves in terms of how we rate against other SaaS solution providers. And then we look at how we did last year and then the next year. And so, I'm happy to say that we increased our net promoter score by 16% year over year. But my philosophy is there's always room for improvement. So, the feedback from our partners on the positive side. They love the Falcon platform. They love the CrowdStrike technology. They love the people that they work with at CrowdStrike. And they like our enablement programs. The areas that they like us to see more investment in is the partner program, better and enhanced enablement, making it easier to work with CrowdStrike and more opportunities to offer services, enhance services to their customers. Do you see any dramatic differences between the types of partners? And if so, why do you think those were? I mean, like you mentioned, IOT partners, that's kind of a new area, you know? So, maybe there was less awareness there. Were there any sort of differences that you noticed by type of partner? I would say that, you know, the areas, the partners that identified areas for improvement were the partners that either were new to CrowdStrike or they're areas that we're just investing in as we expand as a company and a demand from the market is, you know, pull this into these new routes to market. Not one in particular. I mean, IOT is something that we're looking to really blow up in the next 12 to 18 months. But no common thread, consistent feedback across the partner base. Speaking of IOT, you brought it up before. You see it as an adjacency to IOT, and it seems like IOT and IOT used to never talk to each other and now they're increasingly doing so, but they're still, it still seems like different worlds. What have you found and learned in that IOT partner space? Yeah, I mean, I think the key, and the way we look at the journey is, it starts with discovery, discovering the assets that are in the IOT environment. It then transitions to detection and response and really prevention. And once you can solve that and you build that trust through certifications in the industry, you know, it really is a game changer. Any time you have global in your job title, first word that comes to mind for me anyway is sovereignty issues. Is that something that you deal with in this space in terms of partners that you're working with, focusing on partners in certain regions so that they can comply with any governance or sovereignty? Yeah, that's a great question, Dave. I mean, we have a fantastic and deep bench on our compliance team, and there are certain, you know, parameters and processes that have been put in place to make sure that we have a solid understanding in all markets in terms of sovereignty and where we're able to play and how. Yeah, were you North America before or Americas? Americas. America, so you were familiar with the sovereignty issue? Yeah, Latin America's certainly exposed me plenty of that. Yes, 100%. So you mentioned TAM before. I think it was total available market. You had a different word for the T. Total addressable market. Total addressable market. Okay, fine. So I'm here in global. That's a TAM expansion opportunity. IOT is definitely, you know, the OT piece. And then just working better, you know, better groove swing with the partners for higher velocity. When you think about the total available, total addressable market and accelerating penetration and growing your TAM, I've seen the charts in your investor presentation and, you know, it starts out small and then grows to, you know, I think it could be 100 billion. I do a lot of TAM analysis, but just my back and napkin head, you guys approaching 100 billion anyway. How do you think about the TAM and what role do partners play in terms of increasing your TAM? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, if you think about it today, George announced on the day after our 11th anniversary as a company, 20,000 customers. And if you look at that addressable market just in the SMB space, it's north of 50 million companies that are running on legacy on-prem solutions. And it really provides us an opportunity to provide those customers with next generation threat protection and detection and response. Partners are the route to get there. There is no doubt that we cannot cover 50 million. 50 million companies requires a span of a number of service providers and MSSPs to get to that market. And that's where we're making our bets. What's an SMB that is a candidate for CrowdStrike? Is it like employee size or how do you look at that? Like what's the sort of minimum range? Yeah, the way we segment out the SMB space, it's 250 seats or end points and below. 250 end points. Yes, right. And so that would be fairly significant. So if math changes with XDR, with the X and XDR being extended, the greater number of end points means that a customer today, when you talk about total addressable market, that market can expand even without expanding the number of net new customers. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, 100%. Yeah, you got that way and that way. But map that to like company size, can you? Roughly, what's the smallest S that would do business with CrowdStrike? Yeah, I mean, we have companies as small as five employees that will leverage CrowdStrike, yeah, 100%. And they've got hundreds of end points. Oh no, I'm sorry, five end points is the smallest size. Oh okay, so it's kind of 250 end points as what? Like the app, that's the sweet spot. That's kind of the top line we look at and then we focus. Oh okay. When we define SMB, it's below 200. So five to 250 end points, right? And so roughly, so you're talking to companies with less than 100 employees, right? Yeah, yeah, so I mean, this is what I was talking about before. I look around the ecosystem, I say this kind of reminds me of ServiceNow in 2013, but ServiceNow never had a SMB play, right? And you know, very kind of proprietary closed platform, not that you don't have a lot of propriety in your platform, you do, but they were never going to get down market there. And their TAM is not as big in my view, but I mean, your TAM is, when you start bringing an IoT, it's mind boggling. It's endless. How large it could be, yeah. All right, so what's your vision for the Elevate program, partner program? Well, I look at a couple of things that we've have in place today. One is we've established for the first time ever at CrowdStrike, the Alliance Program Management Office, APMO, and that team is focused on building out our next generation partner program. And that's processes, it's ring fencing, but it's most important, more importantly, identifying capabilities for partners to expand, to reduce friction and grow their business together with CrowdStrike. We also look at what we call program harmony, and that's taking all of the partner types, or the majority of the partner types, and starting to look at it with the customer in the middle. And so multiple partners can play a role on the journey to bringing a customer on board initially to supporting that customer going forward, and they can all participate and be rewarded for their contribution to that opportunity. So it's really a key area for us going forward. Haven't spoke model with the center of that model is the customer, you're saying? Yes. Okay, so you're not necessarily fighting each other for a sort of ownership of that model, but cool. Michael Rogers, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. My pleasure, thank you for having me. You're welcome, all right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante will be right back to Falcon 22 from the Aria in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE.