Analysis: CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks SMB Moves Signal New Era In Cybersecurity Channel

The cybersecurity giants are making their biggest bets yet to expand beyond the enterprise—and are pledging to do so with partners front and center.

Last week, the two largest standalone cybersecurity vendors made announcements on the same day that carried an unmistakable, shared theme.

The theme of Thursday’s announcements from CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks goes something like this: In the era of intensifying, rapid and widespread attacks enhanced by AI, there’s no time to waste in bringing cybersecurity to organizations of all sizes.

The announcements signaled an acceleration in efforts to serve SMB and midmarket customers from both cybersecurity giants, as well as massive new opportunities for solution and service provider partners.

To protect organizations against rising AI-driven risk, “we have to leverage the power of the channel, the power of the crowd,” Daniel Danielli, vice president of global scale partnerships at CrowdStrike, told me.

For MSPs, “the attacks that they’re seeing their customers face now—with the advent of frontier AI—are as complex as what a large enterprise is facing,” he said.

I spoke with Danielli as CrowdStrike announced the expansion of its frontier AI security initiative, Project QuiltWorks, to a broad set of MSPs and other partners with the aim of democratizing protection against AI-discovered vulnerabilities to the SMB level.

Likewise, Palo Alto Networks’ newly unveiled Commercial Velocity Program will entail relying on partners to drive adoption of the company’s cybersecurity platform in the midmarket and SMB segments.

“We’re going to draw a line and say, all these accounts are served just by partners,” Simone Gammeri, chief partnerships officer at Palo Alto Networks, told me.

“We don’t need to own the opportunity. You go own the opportunity,” he said.

What we have here, then, are heavy hitters of the cybersecurity industry simultaneously concluding that the time is ripe to move downmarket in a much bigger way.

The implications for the channel could be momentous.

At Chicago-based solution provider powerhouse Ahead, for instance, the moves to drive more cybersecurity business downmarket resonate strongly with Ahead’s own push to expand in the midmarket segment, according to Stephen Ayoub, co-founder and president at Ahead.

Ahead, No. 24 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2026, has continued hiring specifically for its midmarket team following the launch of its dedicated midmarket organization in late 2024, Ayoub told me.

The reality is that “all customers are facing the same problems, especially around security,” he said. “There’s no reason why we can’t continue to grow within that space.”