George Kurtz
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open
Thank you, Maria, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered a strong second quarter with rapid subscription revenue growth and record net new ARR generated in the quarter. Year-over-year, we achieved 104% ARR growth, 98% subscription revenue growth, and 94% total revenue growth which was above the high end of our guidance. We also continued to expand our subscription gross margin and operating leverage. We believe these strong results demonstrate our growing leadership in the security cloud category, which we estimate the global market opportunity to be $24.6 billion in 2019 and growing to over $29 billion in 2021. Burt will discuss the details of our Q2 financial performance in a few moments, but first I will provide a quick update on the progress we made over the past few months in this large and growing market. CrowdStrike stops breaches and we are transforming endpoint security. Our clear technology differentiation is driving our growth which continues to significantly outpace the industry. In addition to stopping breaches, we help customers simplify their security stack with our single-agent architecture and cloud modules. This sets us apart from others in the security industry and a growing number of organizations around the world recognize the power of CrowdStrike's cloud-native Falcon platform. To measure our success executing on our platform strategy, we look at the percentage of all subscription customers that have adopted four or more cloud modules. This percentage rapidly grew to 30% by the end of fiscal 2018 and then to 47% by the end of fiscal 2019. I'm pleased to announce that in Q2, we reached a new milestone with 50% of our subscription customers having adopted four or more cloud modules. The strength of CrowdStrike's Falcon platform is also rapidly gaining industry recognition. As we recently announced, CrowdStrike was positioned as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms. This report evaluates vendors based upon completeness of vision and their ability to execute. Of all EPP vendors, CrowdStrike was positioned furthest to the right for completeness of vision. We believe CrowdStrike's placement in the Leaders Quadrant validates that our single agent architecture, proprietary Threat Graph database, and cloud modules represent the standard in securing the growing workloads of today and the future. In placing CrowdStrike as a leader, Gartner also cited our extensible platform and the CrowdStrike store, the first and only unified security cloud ecosystem of trusted third-party applications. To help foster innovation within the CrowdStrike store ecosystem, we have established the Falcon Fund in partnership with Accel. CrowdStrike Falcon's cloud-native open API architecture was built to provide a shared security ecosystem where developers and partners could dramatically shape the future of security in IT operations. Through the CrowdStrike store, third-party applications can be developed utilizing the massive amounts of endpoint data that our lightweight agent already collects. The Falcon Fund will invest in the next generation of innovators who are leveraging the Falcon platform to solve the most pressing security and IT challenges. We believe our rapid revenue growth at scale and customer acquisition also demonstrate the power of our true cloud-native platform to stop breaches. In Q2, we once again saw an acceleration in customer growth with a record 730 net new subscription customers in the quarter, bringing our customer count to 3,789. By unlocking the power of crowdsourced data, our solution gets smarter the more data it consumes. Each new customer endpoint or workload joining our crowdsourced network increases our effectiveness, intelligence, and competitive advantage. To further highlight our differentiation, initial adoption drivers of the Falcon platform and our ability to leverage a low-friction, high velocity sales model, I will take a moment to share the success we are seeing with our partners and customers. First on the partner front. As you know, we entered into a partnership with Dell and SecureWorks earlier this year. We were chosen by Dell and SecureWorks over the competition in order to advance the industry's most secure commercial PC by offering leading endpoint protection technology from CrowdStrike. We along with Dell and SecureWorks continue to invest in this partnership and initial customer response has been positive. We are excited by the potential opportunities of this partnership, but it's still early days and only represents a small portion of our ARR. As with most partner and reseller relationships, we believe that the customer's choice will ultimately drive the success of the partnership. Given our leading position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and growing customer momentum, we are confident that customers will choose CrowdStrike. At CrowdStrike stopping breaches extends beyond the endpoint and includes securing a wider array of workloads including desktops, servers, mobile devices, virtualized and cloud environments, IoT devices and containers. These workloads need to be protected, and they are growing with every new connected device and every new cloud instance. An increasing number of enterprise customers are migrating to the cloud and modernizing their applications. We have made several strategic investments in our collaboration with AWS, including making our products available on the AWS Marketplace increasing our engagement with the AWS Partner Network and integrating with core security services such as Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub. Over the past six months, CrowdStrike has seen a significant increase in the volume of transactions through the AWS Marketplace, in the co-selling opportunities with AWS sales team and the adoption of our AWS service integrations. Through the marketplace, AWS is selling CrowdStrike to secure their customers’ cloud workloads as well as endpoints that reside on the customers’ corporate network. I would now like to spend a few minutes talking about some of the reasons why we win with customers across diverse verticals and geographies regardless of size. Customers choose CrowdStrike because of our cloud scale AI, our proven efficacy, and our extensible platform. We also win because of our immediate time to value. The first customer story highlights our ability to rapidly deploy our solution at scale. Unlike most of our competitors, our cloud-native solution is rapidly deployable because our lightweight agent is designed to be automatically installed and operational on an endpoint in less than 30 seconds without requiring a reboot and of course without requiring hardware. This is a key factor for customers that want to adopt a new solution rapidly without rebooting their entire business. Take the example from this quarter of a leading beverage company headquartered in Europe that was looking for solution to provide full visibility on their endpoints and that would ultimately replace their antivirus vendor. In this competitive win, CrowdStrike Falcon was tested against an incumbent and other vendors. This new customer was blown away by the ease and speed of CrowdStrike's deployment and efficacy. They were able to turn on tens of thousands of endpoints without a single helpdesk ticket, leading them to standardize globally on the Falcon platform. One month after purchasing our AI-based Falcon Prevent for Next-Generation AV, Insight for EDR and Discover for IT Hygiene, they added Spotlight, our vulnerability management solution to their Falcon platform subscription allowing them to leverage the CrowdStrike agent and data already in place to provide scanless [ph] real-time visibility into vulnerabilities. CrowdStrike's in EPP [ph] trial which allows customers to try new modules with their own data is a key driver of our frictionless cross-sell go-to-market strategy. The second customer story I will share with you is with a global transportation network where we displaced the NexGen vendor. This organization had several of the common complaints we often hear from prospects; one, a growing concern of advanced persistent threats; two, a lack of efficacy by the incumbent; and three, poor endpoint performance due to agent bloat. Engagement with the customer focused on the performance teams via CrowdStrike's cloud-native single agent architecture and the business value of the CrowdStrike platform. This ultimately led to a large deal for NexGen AV, EDR, device control, and our threat hunting module OverWatch. In Q2 we also expanded our engagement with a major U.S. airline. This customer had multiple toolsets on the endpoint including whitelisting and a legacy antivirus which caused complexity and agent bloat. These tools hindered their ability to build a definitive incident response workflow and limited their ability to respond to attacks. During the POC, the whitelisting incumbent put forward their cloud-based EPP offering which failed the technical evaluation. This incumbent was not selected because it was proven to be immature, ineffective, and negatively impacted the performance of their endpoints. This customer now subscribes to five CrowdStrike cloud modules across endpoint security, security in IT operations, and threat intelligence. CrowdStrike is helping protect this customer from breaches while significantly streamlining their security stack with our single agent architecture. And the final customer story I will share with you this quarter demonstrates our free trial is a driving adoption of our platform by removing friction from the sales process and creating a high velocity sales model. An organization based in Asia was using the signature-based AV product embedded in their operating system and was looking to enhance their security with a full EPP solution which is capable of preventing Ransomeware. Starting with our free trial this company explored the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. Impressed with the solution, the prospect engaged with our sales team and quickly became interested in and purchased our Falcon complete offering as a way to add both a true endpoint protection solution as well as a dedicated security team. From trial to close that deal took only three weeks. Overall, the message from our customers that resonates loud and clear is that our platform is clearly unique and differentiated in the marketplace, as no other competitor is able to effectively stop breaches, reduce cost and complexity, and restore endpoint performance like CrowdStrike Falcon. Before I hand it over to Burt, I'd like to discuss our view of the consolidation in the endpoint security market that has occurred over the past few quarters. We have seen three of the larger NexGen endpoint players and the largest legacy endpoint security company decide to sell their business. These companies either originated as on-premise solutions or had an on-premise version and were unable to successfully transition to a true cloud-native architecture without an on-premise version. In addition to the technology barriers, many of these companies struggled converting from a mix revenue model to a subscription only revenue model. Ironically, as our competitors have tried to transition to a cloud architecture, it has forced their customers to look for a true cloud-native endpoint protection platform. We believe this dynamic has contributed to an expansion in our pipeline and an acceleration in our overall customer adoption. Furthermore, we view this consolidation as a strong net positive for our business and validates that cloud-native is hard and costly unless done from inception. CrowdStrike was cloud native from day one and we enjoy first move advantage in cloud delivered endpoint protection. We have the architecture that others strive to emulate and we possess unique technology that allows us to operate effectively at scale. We believe these transactions reflect the growing distance CrowdStrike is putting between ourselves and competitors in terms of both commercial traction and our data moat which provides us with a long-term competitive advantage. Again, this is reflected in our position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant versus all other fossilized and NexGen players. In summary, we are very pleased with our results and even more excited about the future. We continue to pioneer and define a security cloud category and have built a high-performing and enduring business with multiple engines for growth and a frictionless go-to-market strategy. We believe that the market landscape has evolved in our favor and we are well-positioned to capitalize on this growing opportunity. With that, I'll turn the call over to Burt.