Third Bridge专家访谈称CrowdStrike在大型企业平台整合中仍占优但云安全与身份安全存在短板

[[00:02:04]]
From a commercial standpoint, how do you think CrowdStrike's single-agent message has translated into actual platform-level budget capture? Do you see customers truly consolidating spending onto the company's platform, or are they keeping point products for in-depth defence needs?

[[00:02:27]]
I would answer that in two different ways for two different types of clients. For big to really big enterprise clients, this is tens of thousands of employees, those companies increasingly were consolidating with CrowdStrike vs amassing a bunch of point solutions. The big reasons why that trend has been growing over the past couple of years, I think, in favour of CrowdStrike consolidation has been the company has one of the truly most comprehensive cybersecurity platforms. There is less of a need to add on a bunch of point solutions. Specifically for those big enterprise clients, CrowdStrike's platform and its people behind it have become really, really good at serving very complex global companies. A company that has assets and systems all over the world, CrowdStrike has built the sophistication and scale to be able to service that, and that has made enterprise clients more willing to consolidate with CrowdStrike. In the more mid-sized company, that's where I see, certainly, many mid-sized companies are staying with and choosing CrowdStrike. However, I've seen a lot of them also be willing to experiment and explore all sorts of point solutions as well. There are several areas where a mid-sized company has more flexibility and less complexity. There are several areas of CrowdStrike's platform that are incredibly strong, endpoint security probably being the classic one. It's the best in the business.

There are areas of the platform that are certainly not the best of breed. Cloud security would be probably the best example where others like Wiz are a far better offering. I've seen particularly more mid-market companies go with the CrowdStrike platform, but for things like cloud security, go with Wiz. That's just one example. CrowdStrike has been able to mitigate some of that over the past handful of years, they built out a really good partner programme where they are partnering with a lot of point solutions, cybersecurity companies and not just having it be a sales partnership that makes it a little easier to procure, but they also are ingesting those companies' data into the Falcon platform. That makes it both easier for analysts who are using the platform every day, makes it easier for them to see everything in one place vs switching to another point solution, sort of tab. It is also ingesting the data, say, for an e-mail security product, which CrowdStrike doesn't have an in-house one. They have a lot of partners. They built a really good solution whereby ingesting that data from a partner into the CrowdStrike platform, they're sort of able to satisfy that gap in the platform for a mid-market company.

[[00:06:21]]
In July 2026, IBM's CEO Arvind Krishna mentioned in his letter to IBM investors that, "We anticipated some supply chain impact or related impact in our expectations. We did not anticipate the magnitude of the CAPEX reprioritisation. In addition, clients were distracted with rapidly evolving industry-wide cybersecurity concerns in the quarter." How do you see those rapidly evolving industry-wide cybersecurity concerns impacting a company such as CrowdStrike? Are clients shifting from IBM to CrowdStrike? Do you anticipate them also shifting away from the CrowdStrikes of the world? Do you expect CrowdStrike to be the beneficiary of the evolving CAPEX that enterprise customers are considering now? Will the company be negatively impacted by it?

[[00:07:21]]
I would expect the net impact to be favourable to CrowdStrike. The reason for that being that the company overall, the company's total cybersecurity platform is, I think, the best in terms of efficacy in the world. It is also very premium priced. CrowdStrike prices it like that. They have arguably the best cybersecurity talent and a good pipeline for talent to both build the platform and service customers. In the world where cybersecurity threats have become just increasingly more severe and devastating to company's business, but also to governments who are customers of CrowdStrike. Over the past handful of years, it's becoming more common to see companies and governments willing to pay the price premium for CrowdStrike.

At the high level, if a company or a government is looking for a big cybersecurity platform, of which there are only sort of a handful of big companies that do that, CrowdStrike usually often comes up against Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft and SentinelOne. Microsoft and SentinelOne usually way undercut on price, Microsoft being usually the cheapest option. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto are fairly similar in both being more premium priced, but usually, CrowdStrike is the most expensive. I say all of this to say they seem to have been able to prove out that their efficacy, the high efficacy of the products is worth the price premium. That is a lot of what's fuelled their growth and the stock price and all that in the past handful of years.

[[00:10:12]]
When enterprise customers talk about electing a cybersecurity platform, they almost always talk about CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks in the same vein. When does CrowdStrike come out on top of Palo Alto Networks? Do you anticipate this two-horse race between CrowdStrike and Palo Alto continuing, where SentinelOne and Microsoft are displaced, because Microsoft is simply not considered effective enough in some cases, and SentinelOne perhaps doesn't have the full suite of services and isn't cheap enough? Will CrowdStrike continue to be the beneficiary of cybersecurity spend?

[[00:11:25]]
First, talking about Palo Alto, it is very true that both in markets on CNBC but also in customer conversations, CrowdStrike and Palo are very often competing head-to-head. Most customers that are considering a new solution or considering switching to a big platform, it's very rare that they wouldn't consider the two together. The biggest distinctions that I've seen in CrowdStrike vs Palo is CrowdStrike has much more of a fine-tuned and probably the most talented incident response group in the world. Not all, but a healthy amount of new business to CrowdStrike comes when people call the panic phone for CrowdStrike services side and say, "Hey, we have a problem, we've been breached," or something to that effect. "Can you come help us right away?" The incident response group will come in. They'll use CrowdStrike's products to help clean up the mess and that naturally builds a lot of credibility because they're very good at doing it and doing it swiftly. Palo Alto doesn't have that same kind of incident response engine. It helps quite a bit give CrowdStrike an advantage on the customer acquisition side because it's so much easier for them to pitch business if they have just fixed up a mess for you.

The other thing is that services team and that discipline of being really good at incident response, while that's very much a human task of services vs a product, those people very much influence and inform the rest of the company of what's going on. They're also often brought in as experts because they've done incident response on certain industries, they'll come in, both in new business and pitches, but also to serve customers who are in a specific industry vertical, let's say, like hospitals. Hospitals have a lot of unique cybersecurity problems and the incident response folks at CrowdStrike, there are plenty that specialise in hospitals and medical. That crew is one big differentiator when it comes to a new hospital client considering CrowdStrike over Palo.

The one other big advantage is that Palo and CrowdStrike both have, I think they both have the two top CEOs in cybersecurity globally. Nikesh and George, respectively, they're both people who are very good at attracting the top talent. Particularly over the past six years or so, they've both done a very good job of sweeping up just the best cybersecurity talent out there in the industry. People want to work for them, them both. I hold them almost both in kind of similar regards. There is maybe a difference in how that's played out of CrowdStrike has been better at attracting more AI-forward talent, and that's paid off, I think, in recent years, they were early on to really build a large talent pool inside the company of people who are AI experts. Of course, all the companies now are doing the same, but CrowdStrike and George were very good at that talent attraction, probably a little bit better than Palo.

I would also say that Palo has invested more in acquisitions. If you look at their slate of acquisitions they've made especially over the past, maybe five years, they've been the top acquirer in all of cybersecurity. CrowdStrike has certainly made acquisitions and has done a couple a year for the past handful of years, which is nothing small, but Palo is both their pace of acquisitions and also there was, I forget the company name, but there was one massive, I want to say, USD 20bn-something acquisition they did in the past year or so. They've focused a little bit more of building more through acquisitions and CrowdStrike is focused a little bit more on building internally. That has made the CrowdStrike platform a little bit easier to use and the user experience of it is a little bit stronger vs you often hear people who work day-to-day in these platforms talk about Palo is like it's great because they have so much capability because of all these acquisitions, but it's very difficult to stitch those together in an elegant way. Some of them like it feels like a totally separate product. It doesn't feel like it's part of the platform there. Those are a couple of the most important themes that I think about when thinking about CrowdStrike vs Palo.

[[00:17:37]]
I think you were referring to Palo Alto Networks' February 2026 acquisition of CyberArk.

[[00:17:41]]
That's the company.

[[00:17:44]]
CyberArk, of course, is an identity security company. That was an area that I think Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike were lacking in. That's in an effort to shore up that particular area, which seems somewhat prescient now that we're seeing identity security become an even more important level of security with the recent non-human identity increase.

Microsoft reshuffled its security chief in February 2026. What do you think that says about the company's plans for competing in the EDR [endpoint detection and response] identity or general security market?

[[00:18:28]]
A little bit of background on, first, how I see Microsoft competing versus CrowdStrike, let's say, over the past 4-5 years or so. The Microsoft model for a good while has been, they are very price competitive. They're so much cheaper than CrowdStrike and Palo. Of course, part of how they do that is they're bundling with selling Azure and Microsoft 365 and all the other parts of Microsoft to a company. It's not just like a cybersecurity sale. Usually, they're already sold in, in those other aspects to companies and then cybersecurity is another line item within a Microsoft contract. That's been part of why they can price it so cheaply. They have really struggled to attract the top cybersecurity talent. As I was mentioning with Nikesh and George, they both have built these empires of companies who have attracted and retained the best cybersecurity talent. While there certainly are talented people there, Microsoft has, my main theory as to why their sort of overall product suite has struggled in terms of efficacy and user experience is because they just don't have the top people in the industry working on it.

The other thing that I talk about Microsoft vs CrowdStrike is Microsoft, often what comes up in conversations in pitches is CrowdStrike and Palo, their entire business is focused just on cybersecurity, and that's increasingly becoming really important for companies since this isn't a nice software package to have, but it's their business will become messed up if they don't choose the right one, it's really more appealing to say like, "Well, if I go with CrowdStrike or Palo, these companies are spending all of their people and all of their time 100% just on cybersecurity." Their pace of innovation is better than Microsoft and also just their executive attention and ability to respond to things and all of that is the service is so much better because of the focus vs, I don't know what the percentage is of their revenue, but Microsoft, cybersecurity is not their focus. It's just one of many, many things. They've been able to get decent market share mostly because of pricing competitiveness, but that's starting to erode a little bit just because companies now are willing to pay the premium to get something that's much more effective.

The other thing that I think about is, let's see, it slipped my mind, just a moment. With Microsoft, the support that you get, the human support really struggled. Microsoft has outsourced most of their support overseas. That can work fine if it's like, "Oh, we have a PowerPoint problem. Okay, we need support like tech support." Sure, it's fine if you get overseas support for that. A lot of companies really want in-country support, global support, but in-country support for cybersecurity. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto, while they do have global support teams, the service is so much more better and personal. Oftentimes, there's a lot of frustration and switching away from Microsoft that happens. After a team that's using Microsoft for a while is like they encounter big problems because something happens, a problem is emerging, there is a breach or just a possible technical issue. Then when they try to get Microsoft's support like a human to work with them, then the support teams there are very ineffective in comparison. That often is, it's not very visible when you see the pitch decks and etc, but that is often a big reason of switching, especially over the past five years or so, is that just for lack of a better phrase, Microsoft's cheaped out on the support side and a lot of clients feel that's inappropriate for cybersecurity purposes.

[[00:23:42]]
Do you expect customers to push back on the per-seat pricing model in favour of consumption- or outcome-based pricing, which come about due to AI efficiencies? We are witnessing a transition within the broader software space where per-seat pricing is going away in favour of consumption- or outcome-based pricing.

[[00:24:11]]
I think that there has been and there will be pushback for maybe the next year to 18 months or so, just as this is all shaking out. I don't see that as a long-term concern. I think it will cause a little bit of a mess in terms of customers being confused or frustrated by that kind of a shift. Long term, I see more customers being fine with it just because cybersecurity is almost the most obvious case I'd like to pay for an outcome. Yes, that's short term, yes, a little bit of rumbling. Long term, I don't see the issue. Really, one of the biggest sort of possible threats to CrowdStrike long term is that up until recently, their pace of innovation has been amazing. Even as the company scaled, has scaled to, I can't remember the number, but it may be 12,000, 13,000, 14,000 employees now and just a massive scale. George has been able to set a culture and hire the type of talent and structure it so that innovation persists.

There are sort of some signs of, I wouldn't characterise it as a rapid or massive problem, but there are just some signs where there are parts where innovation is stalling a little bit. Cloud security and identity security would be two examples. CrowdStrike does have products in those two areas. If you talk to customers or prospects and you look at the Forrester and Gartner reports and such, they haven't been able to build the best products in those areas, whereas they have in others. I think that a possible question about the long-term future is around just the innovation challenge. Now that that company has become so huge, are they able to keep innovating at that pace? I would say cloud and identity are the biggest reasons why that question is starting to come up.

[[00:26:45]]
As you see companies becoming larger, there is a natural atrophy in terms of innovation. You mentioned identity and cloud security. What product segments do you think are the most important as we move through the AI and AI security world?

[[00:27:10]]
I think identity and cloud are probably two of the most important ones. Maybe I would pick identity as maybe the top priority. Of course, identity security with AI coming in, it's much more rising to prominence. Yes, I would pick identity if I had to pick any of them as like that's the one that's gotten so much more complicated to solve the identity problem over the past, especially two years.

[[00:27:47]]
If CrowdStrike is not able to innovate its way into a good position with identity security, do you expect it to become more acquisitive, something that Palo Alto Networks is recognised for?

[[00:28:05]]
I think, possibly, yes. Because they've been really trying and trying on the identity side, and it hasn't worked. Now, George is really smart, and he in the past has had examples where he's overhauled teams or brought in new talent in order to address a product that's not quite up to par, and he's done that in the past. I think the chances are higher that they'll look towards acquisitions to help solve that gap. It is also possible that they shake it up internally and try to bring in talent to build towards that. I think, ultimately, what they'll try to do is both of those at the same time.

[[00:29:01]]
CrowdStrike's Q1 FY27 module adoption rates reached 51% for six-plus modules, 35% for seven-plus modules and 25% for eight-plus modules. How do you see module adoption rates trending for the company? What do you think are the primary commercial bottlenecks preventing customers from moving from six to eight-plus modules and into utilising the full platform?

[[00:29:39]]
I do see the trends continuing on the path that it has been of where higher percentages of CrowdStrike's customers are adopting more and more modules over time. They've been good at that sort of trend line in the past handful of years. I think they'll continue to be successful in increasing that. The biggest reason for that being CrowdStrike, on CrowdStrike's Falcon platform, it gets better when you use more of the products altogether. It's a little bit cliche, but in the industry, it's like the speed for an attacker to break in is always like shrinking every year from when they start knocking on the door and poking around to when they're actually able to reach into a company. Speed is down to well under an hour now, and it keeps reducing.

I bring that up because when all the products in CrowdStrike Falcon are sort of active and on and stitched together properly within the Falcon platform, it makes both AI, but also human cybersecurity analysts. It makes it so that they can identify threats more quickly and also that they can move more quickly within the system. You might be able to assemble and certainly many do assemble like a best-of-breed approach where they're like, "I want this point product from here and this one from there." Sometimes, where that breaks down is whereas breaches become faster and more rapid, then having it all in one platform means the analysts can handle it all more quickly vs having to hop to different tools and paste in information and patch things together. I think that's one of the big trends why I see increased module adoption.

The other big trend is that, I forget, I think it was late 2024 to early 2025 or so, CrowdStrike introduced this Falcon Flex pricing model that has been very successful. It like lets customers, more from a procurement standpoint, more easily switch on and off products within the platform. That has been really successful. Just as things are changing so much, or the typical big company procurement model tries to force things into like, "Well, you make a decision," and then for one year or two or three years, that's the contract you have and it's a pain to add on stuff. This model makes it more practical to try out new modules and to add on or remove if you don't like them. That's been helpful in CrowdStrike's favour in terms of increased module adoption.

I think the last thing to note would be that because CrowdStrike has built a really good partnership model, I know that the partner numbers naturally don't count towards like financial numbers in terms of number of modules adopted. CrowdStrike is getting a cut or a slice of the revenue from partner module sales that flow into the Falcon platform. Part of the draw of the Falcon platform is that it's a really good hub to then integrate other cybersecurity products and CrowdStrike has built that really well. While that still does mean sometimes selecting a partner, which is not as much revenue as selecting for CrowdStrike as selecting a CrowdStrike-owned product, it's still much better than the alternative of a customer completely going away from CrowdStrike for that product.

[[00:34:12]]
As CrowdStrike is moving higher into the enterprise market, how do you see the multiyear commitments and Falcon Flex agreements changing the predictability of renewal rates? Is that altering the way that customers renew and the scale or frequency at which they renew?

[[00:34:31]]
Yes, it has been quite beneficial in CrowdStrike's favour. It's not an exact comparison, but I see it as much like a while ago when Adobe shifted to much more of a platform subscription model where rather than buying the individual software products on a license each and having a line item each, like you're buying into portions of the Adobe Creative Suite, for instance, and having more ability to use and try out products across the Creative Suite for Adobe, CrowdStrike's model is somewhat analogous to that, and it's worked really well.

[[00:35:18]]
Does the Falcon Flex consumption model alter the typical sales cycle on contract negotiations? Do you see it leading to higher initial land sizes? Does it move the revenue and monetisation curve to later years?

[[00:35:36]]
I see the beginnings of it leading to higher initial land deals because CrowdStrike's classic model or historical model has been land with endpoint security, and you need endpoint security. It's not optional. You can't just sort of only have other things. You have to have that. That was the company's first big success product and the model has been land with endpoint and then over time, expand into other areas. The Falcon Flex pricing model is maybe a portion of the reason why the land sizes have gotten larger. I think that the bigger influence on that is that companies are more realising that the value of going with the CrowdStrike comes with the platform and not with buying it as like a point product or two. The value that I described, particularly around like the speed of attackers, CrowdStrike has become very good at pitching. It is a truth as well that customers get, that's like it's almost sort of you're missing the point if you buy CrowdStrike and just buy two modules. You can do it to wade into the platform and get your feet wet, but it's becoming more understood that the really, the bigger value of CrowdStrike comes when you're using more of the full platform together. I think that's the bigger influence vs just the Falcon Flex pricing model.

[[00:37:27]]
Talking about the AI threat to traditional SaaS, which has been very publicised, and we've heard about it essentially since the beginning of 2026, but was heightened with Anthropic's Claude Mythos release, which has demonstrated unprecedented autonomous zero-day vulnerability discovery and so-called exploit chaining capabilities. How do you think the existence of a tool that can find and prove thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities changes the economic value of traditional endpoint security platforms such as what CrowdStrike offers?

[[00:38:10]]
There was certainly an early phase when Mythos came out that you even see in the stock prices of these companies, CrowdStrike included, that there was a scare of a sense that that could decimate parts of the business. Where I feel it has landed and what I think about the mid-term future at least is that, one, CrowdStrike does have a formal partnership. They are part of the, I forget what it's called, but part of the Mythos…

[[00:38:43]]
Project Glasswing.

[[00:38:44]]
Yes, that's right. They were one of the earliest ones to be part of Project Glasswing. The bigger thing is that I mentioned earlier ago how George and Nikesh at Palo, they've both been very, very good at acquiring just the top cybersecurity talent. CrowdStrike particularly early on to acquire, I shouldn't say acquire, to gather and attract a bunch of very AI-forward talent. That, I think, has paid off short term, but also is going to pay off long term because it's just being part of the Glasswing project and having a partnership there is not enough. CrowdStrike, it has both the talent level of people, but also the scale of volume of talented people to be able to fully make sense of that and fully integrate it into the products. Maybe that's a long way of saying I think that it will be more threatening for many other cybersecurity companies, but especially some point solutions, but CrowdStrike has enough sophisticated talent to figure out how to make sense of it and make a business with that wave coming at it.

In tandem, while that may have an impact on maybe some of CrowdStrike's products, at the same time, there's also the wave of threat actors using AI and they're coming up with even more intricate ways of breaking into companies. That sort of almost counters the trend of, say, would Mythos and similar products from the AI companies, would they decimate part of the business. Maybe to summarise, a lot of cybersecurity companies, especially smaller ones, don't have the talent to truly integrate and also build internally to defend against Mythos, whereas CrowdStrike does. I think Palo does as well.

[[00:41:20]]
CrowdStrike's Q1 FY27 ARR reached USD 5.51bn, which is up 24% YoY. Given the scale, what would you say are the primary structural drivers required to sustain this mid-20% growth rate, whether it is supporting new logo acquisition vs existing customer expansion? How do you see that ARR growth trending in the coming years?

[[00:41:59]]
First on the product side, I think CrowdStrike addressing their gap with identity and cloud security and building those products internally to be better through talent and likely through acquisition, them being able to address those two weaker products in the suite will be key for them to keeping up that kind of revenue growth momentum. The second thing, I think, is that CrowdStrike has grown quite a bit at a very rapid pace over many, many years now in the North America and Europe market. I think they've built just very, both, sophisticated sales teams and models and service teams, but also they've been very good at tuning and building the product to serve North America and Europe customers.

Their ability, particularly to break into markets like Japan, Southeast Asia and places like UAE and the Middle East, that is going to be, I think, the other major factor. I wouldn't say CrowdStrike is weak there, but it's not quite as strong in those markets as it could be, particularly in markets like… While Japan, in total dollar volume, isn't massive, it still represents a big number. Japan CrowdStrike is one of the weakest there. There's a lot of room for growth and opportunity there. Historically, they have placed a little just less emphasis on those regions. I think they're certainly a very global company, but becoming more truly globally successful in like Asia-Pacific and the Middle East will be, I think, the other biggest influence on can they keep a pace at that growth level.

[[00:44:19]]
Do you think CrowdStrike will be able to maintain a mid-20% ARR growth rate in the next 1-2 years? Are there major headwinds that could cause the growth rate to decline?

[[00:44:37]]
If I had to give one answer is, I think within a two-year range, yes, I think they'll be able to maintain that growth rate. It will be challenging for sure. The biggest thing that I could see impacting that would be if there was a change at the CEO level of CrowdStrike. George, he founded the company, and he's been there forever. He carried the company through the big outage of 2024 successfully. Certainly, he's made other very public investments and he's part of more deeply part of, I think, the Mercedes AMG F1 team because racing is a passion of his. I don't really know any sort of information, but I've always thought like he's been such a force in pushing the company forward successfully and building like a culture internally and attracting all this talent, it would be a big blow if he was to, at some point, say, "I'm going to like shift into a chairman-type role," or something like that.

A couple of years ago, he elevated, I'm forgetting his last name, Mike, something to the president role. Mike would probably be the most logical successor. It's question mark as to will that happen at some point or not? I don't know. I do think if or when George leaves the company or more likely shifts into more of a board-type role, I do think that, that would impact the company's ability to keep growing at pace. He's been the one that's made that happen.

[[00:46:50]]
In Q1 FY27, CrowdStrike delivered a non-GAAP [generally accepted accounting principles] subscription gross margin of 81%. As the company scales its AI tools and ingests increasingly large volumes of next-generation SIEM [security information and event management] telemetry, how do you think increased cloud compute and inference costs will impact this margin profile? Do you see that 81% subscription gross margin coming under pressure because of the increased compute and inference costs?

[[00:47:21]]
I do think so a little bit. I don't think it will be a dramatic impact, but I think that it might impact the margins a little bit. As I mentioned earlier, for its entire history, CrowdStrike has kind of taken a, "We're going to be the most premium priced and efficaciously best product, and that's how we're going to go to market." I don't see them abandoning that at all. As they continue to seek continued big growth percentages YoY, they may have to be a little bit more gentle on price. Palo is also very expensive, too. Maybe that's a long way of saying, I think they may have to give just a little bit on margin because of that factor to stay competitive. I don't see it having major impacts.

[[00:48:26]]
To what extent are discounting practices shifting in the industry? Do you see CrowdStrike being forced to offer deeper discounts to secure long-term commitments? How do you see that affecting ACV [average contract value]?

[[00:48:43]]
CrowdStrike had a unique trajectory in terms of like discounting practices because for a long time, they were much tighter on not discounting much. Certainly, they do discount, but not discounting too much compared to the competition. Then the big outage in 2024, they were able to retain 97% of customers is the public figure that they released. That was successful. A big way that they did that was by offering significant discounts to customers to say, "Hey, stay with us." Now in 2026 is when a lot of those customers that received a heavy discount for one year or two, some of them have already come off that, but some of them may have received discounts that lasted a little bit longer. Now, we're at a period where CrowdStrike has returned to its normal pricing methods. I see them needing to do a little bit more discounting than in the past, in part, because just the competition is very high. Palo has kept pace. While I speak negatively about Microsoft in terms of efficacy, which is, I think, very true, Microsoft does compete heavily with CrowdStrike and does win a lot of deals still because they're priced much cheaper.

Oftentimes, those are deals with businesses that are very global, so Microsoft can handle big complex global accounts, but ones where there may be the customer's industry is a little bit less sensitive. Not like banking or healthcare where they're willing to pay a price premium for CrowdStrike. If it's a sector where they perceive there to be a lot less risk, then those are the type of customers that are still choosing Microsoft, and there are plenty out there. I don't think CrowdStrike will take a dramatic turn and start discounting heavily, but I do anticipate to keep pace with growth that especially, say, to win over some of those long-term Microsoft customers that they consider a little bit better discounting or a little bit larger percentage of discount than they have in the past.

[[00:51:28]]
I think companies are running a calculus and asking, "Are we able to develop in-house cybersecurity, maybe not our entire platform, but facets of it and code those in-house." Do you see that proliferation or trend impacting or incentivising the need to discount more from CrowdStrike's point of view?

[[00:52:01]]
I certainly agree with that trend very much, but I think cybersecurity has the biggest moat for that to protect against that. Where I have seen it more is companies historically have spent a lot of human money on what I call like the triage process of cybersecurity. You have human analysts sitting there. They're reading alerts that could be possible things, but a lot of alerts are nothing that matters. They're reading cybersecurity alerts of things that are happening across the company's systems, and you're paying a ton of humans to sit there and in the order they come in reading those alerts.

AI from companies like CrowdStrike and others, from cybersecurity companies, the AI tools have gotten really good at auto triaging. It's not solving the whole problem, but it's saying like, "Hey, the AI is going to look at all the incoming alerts. It's going to ditch 80% of them and say, like these aren't worth paying attention to. They're not threats. They're highly unlikely to be a problem." It's directing the human analysts to say, "Spend your time on this, like 15% or 20% alerts and do this one, not because it came in most recently, and it's the next in your queue, but like go spend your time on investigating this alert because I think the AI thinks it's like a high risk." That is reducing companies' need to spend on human analysts in terms of quantity. I don't see in even the mid-term, most companies trying to develop true AI products themselves because the risk is so high if they get it wrong vs, like I work in marketing, building creative tools and workflows that could maybe replace an Adobe Creative Suite. There's a little bit more, if the company tries to build that and it doesn't work quite right, there's not that much downside other than some wasted time and money. That wouldn't be a cause for concern on the CrowdStrike side.

[[00:54:28]]
What do you think about the long-term margin profile of the Falcon Complete offering? Given it involves human analysts, is it structurally lower-margin than the standard software subscription business? What kind of growth headwind does that represent in terms of gross margins?

[[00:54:49]]
That has been a long-term successful offering from CrowdStrike. I see it continuing to grow and be very successful. Even in this wave of AI changing a lot of things about workflow and human work, a lot of the value of that and why it's been so successful and why I see it continuing to be is especially for even enterprise companies, it is very difficult for them to hire and retain and train and manage people who are 24/7, around the clock across, all time zones as a human analyst team. The model has become much more common for still you're going to have an in-house cybersecurity team, but the talent level is going to become a little bit more senior, and it's very appealing for those folks to say, rather than hire a bunch of analysts and keep recruiting them and then all the sort of things that come with managing a team and then figure out a way to staff them 24/7, 365, they're very willing to pay, in many cases, CrowdStrike, to staff it for them. CrowdStrike has been very good about delivering at a high-quality rate. I see that continuing to be a very solid part of CrowdStrike's business long term.

[[00:56:30]]
Do you anticipate a brain drain of top-tier AI or machine learning engineers from CrowdStrike to younger AI start-ups? Do you anticipate that impacting innovation?

[[00:56:47]]
I think that's a real threat. One, because of the compensation that a lot of these other companies are offering. CrowdStrike compensation is pretty strong. A big lingering question is the stock price has risen over time so strongly. That's really helped retain people over time. Can it keep growing at that fairly rare pace? I think the company will continue to be very successful in the future, but I think it's less likely that the stock will grow at such wild multiples as what it has been. I think that's going to make it more appealing for top AI talent to rotate out of CrowdStrike. I don't see a dramatic brain drain, but I think they're going to be losing some more people than they have in the past, and they're going to have to pay more for top AI talent.

[[00:57:59]]
I think that's a great place to end for the day. Thank you very much for your time and forwardly discussion.

[[00:58:05]]
Absolutely. Likewise, I hope you have a great day.

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