foreign okay we're back at Falcon 2022 crowdstrike's big user conference first time in a couple of years obviously because of kova this is thecube's coverage Dave vellante and Dave Nicholson wall-to-wall coverage two days in a row Michael Rogers the series the newly minted vice president of global alliances at crowdstrike Michael first of all congratulations on the new appointment and welcome to the cube thank you very much it's an honor to be here so dial back just a bit like think about your first hundred days in this new role what was it like who'd you talk to what'd you learn wow well the first hundred days were filled with uh excitement uh I would say 18 plus hours a day getting to know the team across the globe a wonderful team across all of the partner types that we cover and um just digging in and spending time with people and understanding uh what the partner needs were and and and and it was just a it was a blur but a blast I agree with any common patterns that you heard that you could sort of coalesce around yeah I mean I think that uh really what a common thing that we hear at crowdstrike whether it's internal is extra 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 need 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 uh how we optimize uh the different routes to Market with our partners and yeah just a just a it's been a wonderful experience and in my 25 years of cyber security uh actually 24 and a half as of Saturday uh 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 you'll Max funny a lot of times Dave we talk about this is we you know we learned a lot from Amazon AWS with the cloud you know taking something you did internally pointing it externally to Pizza teams there's shared responsibility model we talk about that and and one of the things is blockers you know Amazon uses that term blocker so were there any blockers that you identified that you're 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's prior to the appointment um and had the pleasure of succeeding my dear friend and Mentor Matthew Pauley um 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 how to harness that power of we to drive the most value to the marketplace yeah what is it what does that look like in terms of alliances alliances can take a lot of shape we've we've talked to uh service providers today as an example um our Global Systems integrators in that group also what what is 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 um and store crouchstrike 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 this is a consistent theme we've interviewed a couple here today what's driving that I mean is it the fact that csos are just you know drowning for talent um and why crowdstrike why is there such an affinity between mssps and crowdstrike yeah a great question we um and you noted that uh succinctly that csos today are faced with the number one challenge is lack of resources and cyber security the last that 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 cyber security are north of a half a million uh as we sit here today and um 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 partner survey what 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 no uh 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 uh in the ecosystem and we use the net promoter score model and so we look at ourselves in terms of how we how we uh rate against other SAS solution providers and then we look at how we did last year and in the next year and so I'm happy to say that we increased our net promoter score by 16 percent 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 uh better and enhanced enablement making it easier to work with crowdstrike and more opportunities to offer services enhance services to their customers dramatic differences between the types of Partners and and if so you know why do you think those were I mean like you mentioned you know iot Partners that's kind of a new area you know so maybe 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 or the part the partners that identified areas for improvement were the partners that that uh either were new to crowdstrike or they're areas that we're just investing in uh as as we expand as a company and a demand from the market is you know pull this thing into these new routes to Market um not not one in particular I mean iot is something that we're looking to really blow up in the next uh 12 to 18 months um but no no Common Thread uh consistent feedback across the partner base speaking of iot he brought it up before it's is it in a you see it as an adjacency to i-team it seems like it and OT 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 we the way we look at the journey is it starts with um Discovery discovering the assets that are in the OT environment um it then uh transitions to uh detection and response and really prevention and once you can solve that and you build that trust through certifications in the industry um you know it really is a game changer anytime 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 uh in terms of partners that you're working with uh focusing on Partners in certain regions so that they can comply with any governance or sovereignty yeah that's that's a great question Dave I mean we have a fantastic and deep bench on our compliance team and there are certain uh 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 and uh where we're able to play and how that were you North America before or Americas uh Americas America so you're familiar with the sovereignty issue yeah a little already Latin America is certainly uh exposed me plenty of plenty of that yes 100 so you mentioned uh uh Tam before I think it was total available Market you had a different word for the t uh total addressable Mark still addressable Market okay fine so I'm hearing Global that's a tam expansion opportunity iot is definitely you know the OT piece and then just working better um you know better Groove swing with the partners for higher velocity when you think about the total available total addressable market and and accelerating penetration and growing your Tam I've seen the the charts in your investor presentation and you know 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 a napkin had you guys approaching 100 billion anyway how do you think about the Tam and what role do Partners play in terms of uh increasing your team yeah that's a great question I mean if you think about it today uh George announced on the day after our 11th anniversary as a company uh 20 000 customers and 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 uh Next Generation uh threat protection and and detection and and response partners are the route to get there there is no doubt that we cannot cover 50 50 million companies requires a span of of uh of of of a number of service providers and mssps to get to that market and that's where we're making our bets what what's an SMB that is a candidate for crowdstrike 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 endpoints and below 250 endpoints yes right and so it's going to be fairly significant so math changes with xdr with the X and xdr being extended the greater number of endpoints 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 yeah Fair assessment yep yeah you got that way in that way but but map that to like company size can you roughly what's the what's the smallest s that would do business with crowdstrike yeah I mean we have uh companies as small as five employees that will leverage crowd strike yeah 100 and they've got hundreds of endpoints oh no I'm sorry five uh five endpoints is oh okay so it's kind of 250 endpoints as well like the app that's the sweets that's it's that's kind of the Top Line we look at and then we focus oh okay when we Define SMB it's below so five to 250 endpoints right yes 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 say I look around the the ecosystem myself it kind of reminds me of service now in 2013 but servicenow never had a SMB play right and 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 you they were never going to get down Market there and their Tam is not as big in my view but I mean your team is when you start bringing an iot it's 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 I look at uh a couple things that we've we've have in place today one is um one is we've 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 you know processes it's you know uh it's it's ring fencing but it's most important importantly identifying capabilities for partners to expand to reduce friction and uh grow their business together with crowdstrike we also look at uh 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 Hub and spoke model with the center of the that model is the customer you're saying that's good okay so you're not like necessarily fighting each other for for a sort of ownership of that model but uh 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 we'll be right back to Falcon 22 from the Aria in Las Vegas you're watching thecube foreign [Music]