5 Big Takeaways From CrowdStrike’s 2025 Partner Summit

Top CrowdStrike executives spoke to an audience of hundreds of partners in Las Vegas about surging opportunities including AI security and tool consolidation.

CrowdStrike is continuing to expand its investments into working with solution and service provider partners amid surging growth opportunities including AI security and tool consolidation, executives said during CrowdStrike’s Partner Summit 2025 Monday.

The event, which was held during the cybersecurity giant’s Fal.Con 2025 in Las Vegas, drew hundreds of top partners and featured remarks from CrowdStrike executives including co-founder and CEO George Kurtz and Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard (pictured).

CrowdStrike remains steadfast in its commitment to operating as a “partner-first company” and is increasingly relying upon the channel for delivery of services around its broad cybersecurity platform—especially when it comes to the AI and agentic revolution, Bernard said.

“In this agentic world where the only constant is speed, we all need to go faster, and we need to get comfortable with going faster,” he said. “The good news is, we’re here to help. And we’re here to invest in everybody. We’re here to invest in you.”

Key investments looking ahead from CrowdStrike include a new mobile app for partners that will be available in the fourth quarter, which can be used for deal registration, training and other functions, Bernard said.

“Our goal is to get you learning faster, sourcing faster and closing faster,” he said.

What follows are five big takeaways from CrowdStrike’s 2025 Partner Summit.

Security Is Pivotal To AI Growth

The massive industrywide adoption of AI is only likely to gain momentum as more agentic technologies become available and change the way business is done, creating major opportunities for CrowdStrike and its partners, Kurtz said Monday.

“But we can’t be part of the change unless we secure it,” he said. “Securing AI [is] going to be a big part of the future growth opportunity for us and our partners.”

As just one example, securing identities and access privileges will be essential to enabling AI agents, which need access to numerous systems and data to be useful, Kurtz said.

CrowdStrike has made identity a focus for the past half decade and now offers a number of capabilities for securing identities, he said.

“We’ve been at the forefront of saying you have to be able to secure these identities in order to stop the breach,” Kurtz said. “This is one of these areas that we’re going to be a huge participant in. We already are, with our next-gen identity protection technologies kind of woven together, including PAM [privileged access management]. I think it represents, again, another great opportunity for our partners.”

A Growing Focus On Platform Consolidation

The cost and complexity of operating numerous security tools is continuing to lead more partners and customers to explore platform consolidation, which CrowdStrike is well-positioned to enable with its 30 modules across a range of segments, executives said.

Without a doubt, “consolidation is here,” Bernard said during the Partner Summit Monday.

The benefits for security outcomes alone are a reason for considering a unified platform instead of a “fragmented” set of tools, Bernard said.

“When there’s no single source of truth, because every dashboard says something different, there is no truth,” he said.

CISOs and their teams are “exhausted” by having to manage so many tools, meanwhile, as are procurement teams, Bernard said.

“What’s driving the exhaustion? It’s complexity, but it’s also the desire to not have to go talk to that procurement person so often,” he said.

For organizations looking to simplify their security through consolidation, “they need you,” Bernard said, addressing partners. “And they need us working together. They need us because the attack landscape is moving faster.”

Falcon Flex Model Is Resonating

CrowdStrike’s Falcon Flex subscription model is providing a huge boost to the adoption of Next-Gen SIEM and other newer capabilities as well, and partners are at the center of driving Flex deals, Kurtz said during the Partner Summit.

The Flex subscription model makes it possible for customers to decide over time which technologies to deploy on the Falcon platform after committing to a contract, rather than having to decide up front, according to the company. That provides an incentive to customers to deploy more of the 30 modules on CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform, the company has said.

To date, about 33 percent of partners have taken part in a Flex deal, Bernard said.

With Flex, “the win for us and our partners” is that many customers will end up deploying technologies more quickly than they anticipated originally, leading to an opportunity for further adoption, Kurtz said.

“So it’s a game-changer for us,” he said. “And at some point, [Flex] really is going to be the only licensing model that we have.”

Huge Services Opportunity Ahead

Newer CrowdStrike product segments such as Next-Gen SIEM are proving to be a massive driver of services opportunities for partners, executives said during the Partner Summit.

“It does represent a huge opportunity from a market perspective for our partners, and a huge service opportunity,” Kurtz said. “One [opportunity] is selling new technology. The second piece, then, is really working with customers to help transform what they had [and] reimagining what it could be with Next-Gen SIEM from CrowdStrike.”

Overall, services such as risk-based assessments should be a major area of focus for partners across the Falcon platform, Bernard said.

“There’s a lot of opportunity here—so many assessments to run, so much risk to reduce, so many transformations to drive,” he said.

Future Is ‘All About Growth’

There’s no question that CrowdStrike’s rebound since the massive July 2024 outage caused by a faulty configuration update means that the company and its partners are now focused entirely on the future, which has so many opportunities to pursue, CrowdStrike executives and partners said during the Partner Summit Monday.

“A year ago [when] we were in this room, we were thinking about different things,” Bernard said. “As we kick off this year, it’s all about growth. It’s about acceleration. It’s about the speed of what’s happening in the market.”

CrowdStrike’s unparalleled track record on security made a huge difference in how customers reacted in the wake of the outage, which allowed partners to move beyond the incident relatively quickly, GuidePoint Security’s Jason Braun said during the Partner Summit.

Many customers directly stated that they wanted to stick with CrowdStrike because the vendor had “saved” them from potentially devastating attacks numerous times, said Braun, senior vice president of sales at GuidePoint, No. 37 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025.

“The trust that you’ve instilled in the community—not only in this wonderful [partner] ecosystem, but with the end users—why wouldn’t I get behind it?” Braun said.