George Kurtz
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open
Thank you, Maria, and thank you all for joining us today. CrowdStrike delivered another exceptional quarter. We could not be more pleased with the team’s continued execution, and every CrowdStriker’s commitment and drive to take our company to new heights, even in light of the current macro uncertainty. A few of our accomplishments in the second quarter include setting a record for net new ARR with over $100 million added in the quarter and ending the quarter with a record pipeline; sustaining our strong subscription revenue growth rate of 89%; adding record net new subscription customers of 969; closing the second largest deal in the company history, which was sourced, trialed and closed remotely; and for the second consecutive quarter, we generated non-GAAP operating income. Now, let’s discuss our results and the trends we’re seeing in the market in more detail. With strength in multiple areas of the business, we added $104 million in net new ARR in the second quarter, which was up 77% year-over-year and ahead of our pre-COVID expectations. Additionally, year-over-year, we grew our subscription customer base by 91%, delivered 89% subscription revenue growth and 84% total revenue growth. We once again saw a strong partner engagement and deal flow throughout the quarter among both large and SMB customers that span multiple industries. Additionally, our gross retention rate remained consistently high and our dollar base net retention rate once again exceeded 120%. We also continue to see rapid module adoption by new and existing customers, which is a key tenet of our growth strategy. This quarter, the percentage of all subscription customers with four more modules increased to 57%, and those with five or more modules increased to 39%. Strong secular trends and a favorable competitive environment are fueling our growth. Organizations around the world are shedding outdated systems and accelerating their move to modern cloud-native technologies to meet the demands of today’s threat landscape and future-proof their security architecture. Additionally, as organizations rapidly adapt to the new distributed workforce paradigm and move more workloads to the cloud, it has become clear that the endpoint is the new security perimeter, and the inadequacies of the complex brittle patchwork of legacy solutions continues to be exposed. From the many conversations, Mike Carpenter, CrowdStrike’s President of Global Sales and Field Operations, and I have had with CIOs during our 100-by-100 international virtual customer tour, we consistently heard a few themes from both customers and prospects. First, even in this challenging macroeconomic backdrop, cybersecurity is mission-critical and more important now than ever, as the threat environment escalates and the attack surface continues to grow. This is also consistent with our OverWatch team’s findings. So far, in the first-half of 2020, we have seen a 154% increase in distinct and sophisticated intrusions; stopped 41,000 potential breaches, which is more than all of last year; and we have seen a sharp increase in eCrime with 27 different industry verticals falling victim to criminally motivated intrusions, which is more than double in the same period last year. Additionally, many of the security leaders we spoke with believe that experiencing a breach now, while their business is under extreme stress due to the impact of COVID, would be far more detrimental to their business versus last year. Second, to secure the hybrid workforce in today’s threat landscape, the two most important aspects of security are providing visibility and protection to workloads and implementing a zero trust architecture, which endpoint security is an important foundational element. And third, to protect their businesses, CIOs are looking forward, not backwards. They want cloud platforms that are agile, easy to deploy, easy to manage, even if their security teams are working remotely. As such, today’s refresh is all about digital transformation and eliminating their reliance on complex and fragile legacy technologies. We believe CrowdStrike is a winning combination to continue gaining new customers at a rapid pace, displacing both legacy and next-generation players. Many of the attributes in Falcon that are resonating most with customers, as they address today’s security challenges were purpose-built into the platform from inception. Because the Falcon platform is cloud-native and our lightweight agent does not require reboot unlike most of our competitors, customers can easily and remotely deploy, manage and protect our workloads at scale. Security effectiveness is directly related to the quantity and quality of data collected and the ability to analyze it in real-time. All the data we collect is stored in one place, the Threat Graph, where it’s analyzed almost instantaneously across our entire customer base, providing real-time protection and community immunity. By streaming the telemetry to the cloud with our proprietary smart filtering technology, we believe we have a fundamental time and performance advantage over most vendors, because they store their data locally on the endpoint. Threat Graph is also foundational to our ability to dynamically scale and expand our product lineup, as we collect the data once and have the ability to reuse it many times. This is not only a technology advantage, but also a business model advantage that drives strong gross margin performance. As more business is conducted virtually and more workloads move to the public clouds, protecting those workloads is now a priority for CIOs. CrowdStrike Falcon was built in the cloud for the cloud, and a core differentiator of the Falcon architecture is that we offer one platform for all workloads. The CrowdStrike Falcon platform protects workloads across all environments, including workloads and containers running in both public and private clouds with a single agent and unified user interface. Today, we protect over 1 billion unique container instances and are continuing to build strong momentum with DevOps and security teams. We hope you join our virtual investor session of Falcon on October 15 to learn more about our cloud capabilities. Our technology superiority in protecting cloud workloads led to one of our marquee customer wins this quarter. With a rapid transition to working and socializing from home, Zoom experienced a surge in popularity and became a target for bad actors looking to exploit its success. Their Linux environments in AWS and Oracle Cloud were growing very rapidly to accommodate the increased demand for their SaaS offering. Seeking a strategic partner with a mature product and proven track record in protecting large-scale Linux deployments for other cloud leaders, Zoom called on CrowdStrike to help protect their critical cloud and Linux workloads. Let me share a few additional stories that demonstrate how the power of the Falcon platform translated into customer wins. The next customer win I will highlight is with a multinational financial services company and showcases the velocity of our sales motion, as well as the strategic value of our platform. While this organization had been a professional services client in the past and a threat Intel customer for sometime, they were averse to cloud technologies and entrenched with legacy on-premise vendors. However, in order to adapt to the new realities of a work from anywhere model, they embrace cloud, accelerated their digital transformation plans, and in the process realized they also needed to transform the security architecture and gain visibility into their endpoints. This company was also looking to free themselves from their hodgepodge of legacy solutions and move on to a single platform that could be easily and rapidly deployed globally. The speed of deployment and time to value were critical factors in their purchasing decision, as the mere thought of having to reboot its complex network of systems have kept this organization from moving to a modern architecture sooner. CrowdStrike’s single lightweight agent that can be deployed in seconds and does not require reboot significantly set us apart from the competition and was a large contributor in accelerating this customer’s time to value. The customer recognized CrowdStrike’s superior technology and business value and we closed this deal in eight weeks from proof of value to purchase order, all virtually. We ultimately displaced three incumbent vendors with Falcon Prevent for next-gen AV, Insight for visibility, Discover for IT hygiene and OverWatch for threat hunting. The next customer win I will share is with the leading airline and shows how even companies and severely impacted industries are willing to change course during this critical time and under immense budget constraints in order to have security that just works. This organization was frequently being attacked by adversaries, and the security team was frustrated and fed up with the inability of their patchwork of legacy and next-gen vendors to keep up. As a result, they were spending a lot of money on services to supplement their fragile security tools. By demonstrating the superior capabilities and quick ROI of the Falcon platform, we won this new customer beating and displacing next-gen vendors that had ineffective and cheaper solutions. The last customer win I will share with you is with a leading U.S. hospital based in the Pacific Northwest that was looking to replace four incumbent legacy vendors in support of their initiative to move to the cloud and use of virtual desktops. This organization was looking for a suite of solutions on an extensible platform, including an open ecosystem like the CrowdStrike Store. It was also interested in managed security services, so they can free up constrained internal resources, while at the same time fortifying their security posture. While the competition was trying to leverage their bundled license structure, along with their cloud hosting relationship, they could not produce one single reference that could speak to the quality of their managed services. CrowdStrike, on the other hand, offered multiple references in their own industry and won the deal on the spot. In addition to Falcon Complete, our fully managed endpoint protection offering, this new customer is using six Falcon modules. These are just a few of our 7,230 subscription customers as of the end of the quarter that have turned to CrowdStrike to help them stop breaches, transform their security posture and streamline their IT operations. As you can see from the exceptional results we reported today, we are building strong momentum in the market, as companies fast-forward their businesses to an all digital world and embrace the future. In this new normal, companies recognize that security transformation is fundamental to digital transformation. With our cloud-native platform, purpose-built to solve modern security challenges, CrowdStrike is in a unique position to capitalize on this long-term sustainable trend and expand our leadership in the security cloud category. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Burt.