RSA Conference 2024 | Daniel Bernard | CrowdStrike

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Daniel Bernard

Chief Business Officer

CrowdStrike

Unlocking the future of cybersecurity: Insights from CrowdStrike’s chief business officer

Cybersecurity industry trends, such as cloud security and artificial intelligence integration, are pivotal as businesses continually adapt to a changing landscape.Meanwhile, security is in a transformative stage with the addition of new tools and vendors, fueled by organic and existing company innovation. CrowdStrike is fortunate to be at the nexus of both, according to Daniel Bernard (pictured), chief business officer of CrowdStrike Inc.CrowdStrike’s Daniel Bernard speaks to theCUBE about cybersecurity industry trends.“We have our own organic innovation where we’re shipping new products … we are also acquiring companies,” Bernard said

play_circle_outline Exploring the Rising Demand for Cybersecurity Consolidation: Evaluating CrowdStrike's Innovative Organic Growth and Acquisition Approaches

play_circle_outline Overcoming Customer Challenges: CrowdStrike's Best-of-Breed Consolidation & Open Platform Revolution

play_circle_outline Enhancing SOC Analyst Experience with CrowdStrike's AI Technology Charlotte and the Imperative of Enterprise AI Security

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Daniel Bernard | CrowdStrike

Daniel Bernard

Chief Business Officer CrowdStrike

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>> Hi everybody. Welcome back to theCube's coverage. It's day three of RSAC 2024. We're here at Broadcast Alley. Come on inside. theCube. Daniel Bernard is here from CrowdStrike. He's the Chief Business Officer, friend of theCube. Great to see you again. Thanks for making some time here.

Daniel Bernard

>> Great to be here.

>> You must be swamped, right?

Daniel Bernard

>> It's a busy show. It's busy because demand is off the charts. Customers are looking for consolidation. We're here to talk.

>> Falcon, of course, is your show, but it's confined, right? I mean, you're in a small space here. It's like 50,000 people. It's insane. Okay, let's go right to the chase, consolidation. When I talked to you, I certainly got this story from Jay Chaudhry last night. The consolidation theme is playing. You're seeing it in your customer base. But broadly, we still, when we talk to practitioners, they're adding more tools, they're adding more vendors, and so it's almost like the addition of all the toolings is faster than you can gobble them up. What's happening out there?

Daniel Bernard

>> Well, there's organic innovation too. So I think what's really going on is security is in this transformative stage where folks are saying, I need new capabilities. I need new ways to stop the breach. That's fueled by either new companies doing innovation or existing companies doing innovation. We're really fortunate at CrowdStrike that we're living at the nexus of both of those thrusts. We have our own organic innovation where we're shipping new products. Our next-Gen SIM. We are also acquiring companies. The acquisition of Flow Bionic, where our cloud security suite is really maturing into a fully featured suite that displaces multiple point products. Consolidation is coming from a lot of places, cost, pressure, but also it's really complicated to manage 70 different products. Good luck. Good luck logging into 70 different consoles, training your staff, having enough staff to even think about it. Consolidation is also happening on the partner side where partners are saying, I don't want to have 70 different vendors on my line card, I want to focus on the platforms. I need to focus on CrowdStrike.

>> Yeah, so here's the thing. We just in a recent survey, and we asked customers, are you able to reduce your number of vendors? Most said no. But we asked them why. They said, because we need best of breed. And so the interesting thing about CrowdStrike is, like you said, you've got organic innovation and then you buy a company that does log scale, you bring that into the raptor announcement, now you've got best of breed and you could do consolidation. So you're kind of unique in that regard, quite frankly.

Daniel Bernard

>> We are, and we really get to straddle both worlds. The platform's an open platform. So the benefit of that open platform approach is you can bring your own capability set from a point product vendor, and we'll welcome that with open arms. This is not a walled garden where you have to use everything that we do. We have 28 fantastic modules. We help customers consolidate. I don't think there's very many vendors. I think one of the reasons your survey says what it says is there's really not very many vendors on the market that can really deliver consolidation. Where the different products in the portfolio are actually best of breed in their own MQs. Multiple MQs, Forrester Waves. We have that capability set where you look in cloud security, Forrester Waves leader, you can look across everything we do. We're leading the pack. We can make that consolidation a reality and we deliver that. At the same time, if an organization has a vendor they really like and they appreciate the technology, it's welcome in the Falcon platform.

>> What Jay Chaudhry told me last night, because I was talking to him about this topic, and he said, the key is you think about the CEO, A lot of their job is TAM expansion. But he said, "You can't go too far. You have to partner." And that's where he was saying you're seeing a lot of wins in the consolidation front because when you go to Falcon for instance, you see obviously it's a CrowdStrike show, but there's Zscaler. There's Okta. You're not trying to be an identity player, but you'll secure the identity as an endpoint. So I thought that was an interesting nuance, and I feel like you don't run out of TAM for a while. TAM expansion market, your market opportunity is not the problem right now for you.

Daniel Bernard

>> There's a lot of TAM. I mean, security is not a winner, takes all market. We like though, when IDC says that we have the number one share, but we have a great partnership with Zscaler where we know our areas of competence, they know theirs. We're here to secure device data, cloud identity, and they do a fantastic job securing the network, making sure that as that device connects to the web, everything is secure. We have thousands of customers using the integration. That's a great example of customers choosing best of breed, wanting what Jay has to offer at Zscaler and what George and CrowdStrike has to offer over a lot of other choices on the market.

>> What is the hardest part, from a customer standpoint, of getting to that point where they can... We call it GRS. Getting rid of stuff, and they can actually take the leap to concise. Is it like the penguin and the iceberg? The first tool to go is maybe slow, and then once it starts, it starts rolling, but take us to the customer-

Daniel Bernard

>> It's a good question. GRS, I like that.

>> Yeah, Getting Rid of Stuff.

Daniel Bernard

>> Getting Rid of Stuff. Okay. The quickest way to get into GRS mode... It sounds like DRS from Formula One. The quickest way to get into GRS mode is for technology that actually works. You'd be surprised how many vendors on the floor are living in PowerPoint. Their PowerPoint platforms. Everyone has a platform. No one's ever seen a PowerPoint that's wrong. Every PowerPoint looks great. So many of these products are just features and there's a lot of great ISVs in the market. We partner with over 500 of them. But when it comes to how you actually get rid of stuff, very few of them actually replace another from a fully featured capability set. Well, we kind of do a little of this and we do a little of that and maybe a little of that, and we have a nice UI. That's the theme of where a lot of these technologies really are. So it's really hard to get rid of stuff if you don't have something that can predict, prevent, detect, respond, and really work a workflow. There's a lot of fragments, not a lot of sentences. And that's the problem today of why customers aren't able to get rid of vendors.

>> What's the status of Charlotte? She was the superstar at Falcon. Of course, even at Black Hat when you announced that George was pretty forceful about a lot of PowerPoints. We were the only one actually showing real use of Gen.AI. You announced it, you showed it off at Black Hat. You announced pricing at Falcon, which caught me off guard. Because, I think it was like 20 bucks an endpoint per year. And I was thinking about the Microsoft Copilot.

Daniel Bernard

>> Copilot's expensive.

>> 30 bucks a month per year.

Daniel Bernard

>> A month. Yeah.

>> I mean, I know there's a lot of endpoints out there too, but what's the uptake been like?

Daniel Bernard

>> We're seeing strong demand. People are really curious. I think you look at last year. Last year, everyone was putting out press releases, got to put AI everywhere. Last year was like the word salad of AI. Everyone was talking about AI, AI, AI. Now, this year is all about prove it. What are you actually doing? So you're seeing the tide go out and who actually has something to show, and who's running away with the tide because they're running around without clothes on. So the ability that Charlotte has to supercharge an analyst, somebody who may not be that knowledgeable about security, or even somebody who is super knowledgeable about security but wants to be able to do a lot more with their day, we're able to show, the data shows us that we're able to take eight hours of work and bring it down to less than 30 minutes. Activities like where is this occurring in my environment? What does this mean? Who is this adversary? We have all this data, cyber security's richest set of data from an adversary perspective. CrowdStrike found these adversaries, named them, tracked them, mapped them, and we write about them, and then the news reports on them with the names that we choose and that we come up with and educate the world on adversaries. So the ability to ask all these questions, get answers, and then turn the answers into action is really magical. It's like, I don't know about you if you've played with ChatGPT at all. But you can have ChatGPT do art for you and write emails for you. Imagine if you can do that with threat hunting where you may not know our language. Our language is pretty uniform and ubiquitous at this point. You can look at a lot of job wrecks for cyber security. The requested skill set is CrowdStrike experience. So it's a great spot to be in the market, but there's folks that are just learning. Imagine Charlotte is helping them write queries automatically putting that in LogScale, NextGen, Sim, turning the verdicts into context and awareness and turning context and awareness into action without a click. That's pretty powerful.

>> One of my favorite interviews at Falcon last year was with Ali Mellon, who's an analyst at Forrester. And she talked a lot about the SOC analyst experience. Not a lot of analysts really focus on that, but Charlotte was a perfect example of how that SOC analyst experience could potentially change. So I like that. Now, I want to ask you about AI. There's AI that makes security better, changes that SOC analysts experience or automate certain things or machine learning. You guys have been at this for many, many years in AI. There's also a lot of discussion about securing AI. Just as Amazon turned the data center into an API ChatGPT has turned technology into a natural language interface and it requires different thinking. How do you think about those two things? How are customers thinking about them?

Daniel Bernard

>> I mean, AI security is certainly a very hot and new area. I think there's a lot of talk about it. People are still figuring out how to use Generative AI in their enterprise. The next question is then how do you secure it? The first stage is getting visibility over it. And I think we have a lot of great solutions to help customers get visibility over where and when is AI being used in the enterprise? We haven't quite figured out the why yet, when, where, why. And we're good at the how as well. I think over the next couple of years, we're going to see a lot more maturity and innovation around AI security, and I think the convergence is going to be with data security and AI security. So if you look at modules that we have here at CrowdStrike Falcon data protection, which is today replacing DLP products, that coupled with our DSPM, data security Posture management, those things coming together in a really transformational way for customers, that's the right spot for us to continue the innovation curve and bring AI security into the mix. But I just think it's the extreme early innings of this Generative AI era where organizations are figuring out, it's like the Age of Enlightenment right now. Everyone's like, what's this? How do I use it? Is this good? Is this bad? How do I control it? But this is all a continuum, and I think that convergence of data security and AI security is where the market's going.

>> Go-to-market philosophy. So you guys obviously crushed the belly-to-belly side of things, and you could see it in Falcon. The ecosystem expanding. The GSIs are coming in heavy. You got your Dell relationship, you got your managed service provider program that you guys launched. How's that all going? You guys are scaling go-to-market like crazy. You're the go-to-market leader. Give us the playbook?

Daniel Bernard

>> No, the growth is continuing. And what's really exciting about our place in the market and where we're at on the growth curve is the partners that are leading us. Over 60% of our new logos in the last year are coming from partners. These are real numbers. These are big numbers. And what's so exciting about our platform is a partner can do the upselling themselves. So you deploy once, single agent, single platform, single workflow, single console. You juxtapose that, by the way, with some of our competitors that are multi-platform vendors with multi-agents. Hard to keep all that stuff straight. But the single platform architecture, we collect the data once we use it many times. Today, 28 modules. That's 28 different opportunities for a partner to sell, but also add services around that capability set. So this is like a dream come true, and this is where the consolidation comes into play. The consolidation is there's all these customers in the market that have CrowdStrike. There's plenty that don't have CrowdStrike. New logo acquisition, huge opportunity for partners. Then for those that are focused on continuing to grow their business with us, we're that platform for that growth. And it's great for us because that's NRR growth. More modules that partners sell more NRR for us. So there's multiple ways to win in the game, but the most important thing is you must be present to win. So you see all of these large partners. Most recently TCS just jumped on board with us. You see it in the MSSP space with PAX eight, the marketplace of the MSP market today. Ninja one this week, the endpoint management and RMM of the MSP market. You see Dell, you see the Hyperscalers.

>> GSIs,

Daniel Bernard

>> GSIs. Everyone is part of the crowd, and because everybody in the crowd's a winner.

>> I love it. We asked George Kurtz, when are you going to stop? How many modules are you going to actually build? He'll show you an infinity sign. Daniel, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to come by and be with us.

Daniel Bernard

>> Pleasure to be here. Thanks a lot.

>> All right, keep it right there. We're rolling. We're rocking. Day three at RSAC 2024. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.

Daniel Bernard | CrowdStrike

search

>> Hi everybody. Welcome back to theCube's coverage. It's day three of RSAC 2024. We're here at Broadcast Alley. Come on inside. theCube. Daniel Bernard is here from CrowdStrike. He's the Chief Business Officer, friend of theCube. Great to see you again. Thanks for making some time here.

Daniel Bernard

>> Great to be here.

>> You must be swamped, right?

Daniel Bernard

>> It's a busy show. It's busy because demand is off the charts. Customers are looking for consolidation. We're here to talk.

>> Falcon, of course, is your show, but it's confined, right? I mean, you're in a small space here. It's like 50,000 people. It's insane. Okay, let's go right to the chase, consolidation. When I talked to you, I certainly got this story from Jay Chaudhry last night. The consolidation theme is playing. You're seeing it in your customer base. But broadly, we still, when we talk to practitioners, they're adding more tools, they're adding more vendors, and so it's almost like the addition of all the toolings is faster than you can gobble them up. What's happening out there?

Daniel Bernard

>> Well, there's organic innovation too. So I think what's really going on is security is in this transformative stage where folks are saying, I need new capabilities. I need new ways to stop the breach. That's fueled by either new companies doing innovation or existing companies doing innovation. We're really fortunate at CrowdStrike that we're living at the nexus of both of those thrusts. We have our own organic innovation where we're shipping new products. Our next-Gen SIM. We are also acquiring companies. The acquisition of Flow Bionic, where our cloud security suite is really maturing into a fully featured suite that displaces multiple point products. Consolidation is coming from a lot of places, cost, pressure, but also it's really complicated to manage 70 different products. Good luck. Good luck logging into 70 different consoles, training your staff, having enough staff to even think about it. Consolidation is also happening on the partner side where partners are saying, I don't want to have 70 different vendors on my line card, I want to focus on the platforms. I need to focus on CrowdStrike.

>> Yeah, so here's the thing. We just in a recent survey, and we asked customers, are you able to reduce your number of vendors? Most said no. But we asked them why. They said, because we need best of breed. And so the interesting thing about CrowdStrike is, like you said, you've got organic innovation and then you buy a company that does log scale, you bring that into the raptor announcement, now you've got best of breed and you could do consolidation. So you're kind of unique in that regard, quite frankly.

Daniel Bernard

>> We are, and we really get to straddle both worlds. The platform's an open platform. So the benefit of that open platform approach is you can bring your own capability set from a point product vendor, and we'll welcome that with open arms. This is not a walled garden where you have to use everything that we do. We have 28 fantastic modules. We help customers consolidate. I don't think there's very many vendors. I think one of the reasons your survey says what it says is there's really not very many vendors on the market that can really deliver consolidation. Where the different products in the portfolio are actually best of breed in their own MQs. Multiple MQs, Forrester Waves. We have that capability set where you look in cloud security, Forrester Waves leader, you can look across everything we do. We're leading the pack. We can make that consolidation a reality and we deliver that. At the same time, if an organization has a vendor they really like and they appreciate the technology, it's welcome in the Falcon platform.

>> What Jay Chaudhry told me last night, because I was talking to him about this topic, and he said, the key is you think about the CEO, A lot of their job is TAM expansion. But he said, "You can't go too far. You have to partner." And that's where he was saying you're seeing a lot of wins in the consolidation front because when you go to Falcon for instance, you see obviously it's a CrowdStrike show, but there's Zscaler. There's Okta. You're not trying to be an identity player, but you'll secure the identity as an endpoint. So I thought that was an interesting nuance, and I feel like you don't run out of TAM for a while. TAM expansion market, your market opportunity is not the problem right now for you.

Daniel Bernard

>> There's a lot of TAM. I mean, security is not a winner, takes all market. We like though, when IDC says that we have the number one share, but we have a great partnership with Zscaler where we know our areas of competence, they know theirs. We're here to secure device data, cloud identity, and they do a fantastic job securing the network, making sure that as that device connects to the web, everything is secure. We have thousands of customers using the integration. That's a great example of customers choosing best of breed, wanting what Jay has to offer at Zscaler and what George and CrowdStrike has to offer over a lot of other choices on the market.

>> What is the hardest part, from a customer standpoint, of getting to that point where they can... We call it GRS. Getting rid of stuff, and they can actually take the leap to concise. Is it like the penguin and the iceberg? The first tool to go is maybe slow, and then once it starts, it starts rolling, but take us to the customer-

Daniel Bernard

>> It's a good question. GRS, I like that.

>> Yeah, Getting Rid of Stuff.

Daniel Bernard

>> Getting Rid of Stuff. Okay. The quickest way to get into GRS mode... It sounds like DRS from Formula One. The quickest way to get into GRS mode is for technology that actually works. You'd be surprised how many vendors on the floor are living in PowerPoint. Their PowerPoint platforms. Everyone has a platform. No one's ever seen a PowerPoint that's wrong. Every PowerPoint looks great. So many of these products are just features and there's a lot of great ISVs in the market. We partner with over 500 of them. But when it comes to how you actually get rid of stuff, very few of them actually replace another from a fully featured capability set. Well, we kind of do a little of this and we do a little of that and maybe a little of that, and we have a nice UI. That's the theme of where a lot of these technologies really are. So it's really hard to get rid of stuff if you don't have something that can predict, prevent, detect, respond, and really work a workflow. There's a lot of fragments, not a lot of sentences. And that's the problem today of why customers aren't able to get rid of vendors.

>> What's the status of Charlotte? She was the superstar at Falcon. Of course, even at Black Hat when you announced that George was pretty forceful about a lot of PowerPoints. We were the only one actually showing real use of Gen.AI. You announced it, you showed it off at Black Hat. You announced pricing at Falcon, which caught me off guard. Because, I think it was like 20 bucks an endpoint per year. And I was thinking about the Microsoft Copilot.

Daniel Bernard

>> Copilot's expensive.

>> 30 bucks a month per year.

Daniel Bernard

>> A month. Yeah.

>> I mean, I know there's a lot of endpoints out there too, but what's the uptake been like?

Daniel Bernard

>> We're seeing strong demand. People are really curious. I think you look at last year. Last year, everyone was putting out press releases, got to put AI everywhere. Last year was like the word salad of AI. Everyone was talking about AI, AI, AI. Now, this year is all about prove it. What are you actually doing? So you're seeing the tide go out and who actually has something to show, and who's running away with the tide because they're running around without clothes on. So the ability that Charlotte has to supercharge an analyst, somebody who may not be that knowledgeable about security, or even somebody who is super knowledgeable about security but wants to be able to do a lot more with their day, we're able to show, the data shows us that we're able to take eight hours of work and bring it down to less than 30 minutes. Activities like where is this occurring in my environment? What does this mean? Who is this adversary? We have all this data, cyber security's richest set of data from an adversary perspective. CrowdStrike found these adversaries, named them, tracked them, mapped them, and we write about them, and then the news reports on them with the names that we choose and that we come up with and educate the world on adversaries. So the ability to ask all these questions, get answers, and then turn the answers into action is really magical. It's like, I don't know about you if you've played with ChatGPT at all. But you can have ChatGPT do art for you and write emails for you. Imagine if you can do that with threat hunting where you may not know our language. Our language is pretty uniform and ubiquitous at this point. You can look at a lot of job wrecks for cyber security. The requested skill set is CrowdStrike experience. So it's a great spot to be in the market, but there's folks that are just learning. Imagine Charlotte is helping them write queries automatically putting that in LogScale, NextGen, Sim, turning the verdicts into context and awareness and turning context and awareness into action without a click. That's pretty powerful.

>> One of my favorite interviews at Falcon last year was with Ali Mellon, who's an analyst at Forrester. And she talked a lot about the SOC analyst experience. Not a lot of analysts really focus on that, but Charlotte was a perfect example of how that SOC analyst experience could potentially change. So I like that. Now, I want to ask you about AI. There's AI that makes security better, changes that SOC analysts experience or automate certain things or machine learning. You guys have been at this for many, many years in AI. There's also a lot of discussion about securing AI. Just as Amazon turned the data center into an API ChatGPT has turned technology into a natural language interface and it requires different thinking. How do you think about those two things? How are customers thinking about them?

Daniel Bernard

>> I mean, AI security is certainly a very hot and new area. I think there's a lot of talk about it. People are still figuring out how to use Generative AI in their enterprise. The next question is then how do you secure it? The first stage is getting visibility over it. And I think we have a lot of great solutions to help customers get visibility over where and when is AI being used in the enterprise? We haven't quite figured out the why yet, when, where, why. And we're good at the how as well. I think over the next couple of years, we're going to see a lot more maturity and innovation around AI security, and I think the convergence is going to be with data security and AI security. So if you look at modules that we have here at CrowdStrike Falcon data protection, which is today replacing DLP products, that coupled with our DSPM, data security Posture management, those things coming together in a really transformational way for customers, that's the right spot for us to continue the innovation curve and bring AI security into the mix. But I just think it's the extreme early innings of this Generative AI era where organizations are figuring out, it's like the Age of Enlightenment right now. Everyone's like, what's this? How do I use it? Is this good? Is this bad? How do I control it? But this is all a continuum, and I think that convergence of data security and AI security is where the market's going.

>> Go-to-market philosophy. So you guys obviously crushed the belly-to-belly side of things, and you could see it in Falcon. The ecosystem expanding. The GSIs are coming in heavy. You got your Dell relationship, you got your managed service provider program that you guys launched. How's that all going? You guys are scaling go-to-market like crazy. You're the go-to-market leader. Give us the playbook?

Daniel Bernard

>> No, the growth is continuing. And what's really exciting about our place in the market and where we're at on the growth curve is the partners that are leading us. Over 60% of our new logos in the last year are coming from partners. These are real numbers. These are big numbers. And what's so exciting about our platform is a partner can do the upselling themselves. So you deploy once, single agent, single platform, single workflow, single console. You juxtapose that, by the way, with some of our competitors that are multi-platform vendors with multi-agents. Hard to keep all that stuff straight. But the single platform architecture, we collect the data once we use it many times. Today, 28 modules. That's 28 different opportunities for a partner to sell, but also add services around that capability set. So this is like a dream come true, and this is where the consolidation comes into play. The consolidation is there's all these customers in the market that have CrowdStrike. There's plenty that don't have CrowdStrike. New logo acquisition, huge opportunity for partners. Then for those that are focused on continuing to grow their business with us, we're that platform for that growth. And it's great for us because that's NRR growth. More modules that partners sell more NRR for us. So there's multiple ways to win in the game, but the most important thing is you must be present to win. So you see all of these large partners. Most recently TCS just jumped on board with us. You see it in the MSSP space with PAX eight, the marketplace of the MSP market today. Ninja one this week, the endpoint management and RMM of the MSP market. You see Dell, you see the Hyperscalers.

>> GSIs,

Daniel Bernard

>> GSIs. Everyone is part of the crowd, and because everybody in the crowd's a winner.

>> I love it. We asked George Kurtz, when are you going to stop? How many modules are you going to actually build? He'll show you an infinity sign. Daniel, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to come by and be with us.

Daniel Bernard

>> Pleasure to be here. Thanks a lot.

>> All right, keep it right there. We're rolling. We're rocking. Day three at RSAC 2024. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.