CrowdStrike Remains In Prime Position Amid AI ‘Software Apocalypse:’ Analyst

Despite investor concerns over AI’s disruption of major software makers, CrowdStrike is among the vendors poised to see massive opportunities thanks to its pivotal role in securing AI, according to Wedbush’s Daniel Ives.

While the “software apocalypse” strikes Wall Street due to fears over AI’s impact on the industry, vendors including cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike are well-positioned to see massive opportunities regardless of how AI disruption plays out, according to prominent analyst Daniel Ives.

In a note to investors Thursday—a day that saw stock markets sink amid a major tech sell-off—Ives pointed to CrowdStrike as well as Microsoft, Snowflake, Salesforce and Palantir as five vendors poised to remain in high demand going forward.

Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities, said he has no doubt that the near-term “doomsday scenario” for software makers that investors seem to be anticipating is “extremely overblown.” Concerns about data governance and security will naturally constrain the more aggressive AI adoption strategies, at least until “there is less risk with these migration projects,” he wrote.

In addition, the reality is that existing enterprise software implementations have “taken many decades to accumulate with trillions of data points now ingrained in software infrastructure company ecosystems,” Ives wrote. “New players like OpenAI/Anthropic don’t have the current capacity to hold all enterprise data to power AI integrations and protect organizational data structures from malware.”

Still, it’s clear that there are some vendors that are especially well-positioned for whatever scenario ends up transpiring in the AI revolution, according to Ives.

CrowdStrike is clearly one of those vendors in a prime position, thanks to its focus on securing AI usage itself as well as protecting against increasingly AI-powered attacks, he wrote.

The company also has the advantage of being an “agnostic” player in the AI wars—while at the same time offering security technology that will be increasingly “essential” as AI and agentic adoption surges, Ives wrote.

In short, many indications suggest that CrowdStrike is likely to become “the cybersecurity operating system of the AI era,” he wrote.

“We believe that CRWD’s position as the gold standard of cybersecurity remains firmly unchanged in the face of this Software Armageddon,” Ives wrote.

Security ‘Hyperscaler’

In an interview with CRN in November, CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz said the company is functionally the industry’s first “hyperscaler for security,” positioned to do for cybersecurity what Amazon Web Services did for public cloud.

“We’re in a unique position in the industry because we do have the single platform to make all this work—as opposed to many things out there that are kind of stitched together,” Kurtz said.

Making “all this work,” from CrowdStrike’s perspective, includes offering an open, cloud-native platform that provides high scalability and a subscription model with the ability to add additional security products near-instantly in order to rapidly scale up protections against emerging and expanding threats. That includes threats that are intensifying as a result of attackers using AI and agents to accelerate their activities targeting businesses, according to CrowdStrike.

For solution providers such as SHI International, the strategy has helped to bolster huge momentum for its partnership with CrowdStrike, according to Brian McGrath, vice president of commercial and SMB sales at Somerset, N.J.-based SHI, No. 12 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500.

“When you think about a hyperscaler, the underlying themes are its speed, its scale and its trust,” McGrath said in a previous interview. “I think that accelerated growth we’re seeing from CrowdStrike is really due to those three things. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”