CrowdStrike’s customers appear to have forgiven it for June 2024’s staggering outage – “everyone loves a comeback story” said CEO George Kurtz as he reported a Q4 that saw it close “new records in every total deal value segment. Over 20 deals greater than $10 million, over 350 deals greater than $1 million, over 2,300 deals greater than $100,000…”
Despite these wins it slumped to a $92.3 million net loss in Q4 – $21 million of that due to “incident related expenses” earnings showed. But with 97% gross retention throughout the year and its fiscal 2025 ending with ARR at $4.24 billion, executives were upbeat on a late Tuesday call.
A 2023 licensing offer called “Falcon Flex” was important to the rebound: The subscription model “enables customers to adopt the modules they want across their subscription term” Kurtz told analysts on the Q4 call: “It opens the entire product catalog up to our customers and then they can add new modules without necessarily going through a procurement cycle.
“They commit -- the more they commit, the better the discounts and they can basically use that very seamlessly in their environment,” he explained.
In the wake of the outage CrowdStrike rolled out a “customer commitment package” (CCP) programme that included discounts and flexible payment terms. The strong results have clearly restored corporate confidence and this now being wound down, Kurtz confirmed to analysts.
“The CCP program was an excellent proactive measure, which… also resulted in significant platform adoption. This uptake gives me confidence in our second half net new ARR reacceleration as products are deployed, one-time discounts drop off, and contracts are upsized and renewed.”
Strikingly, CrowdStrike also secured $1 billion in sales through AWS Marketplace over just 12 months, as it “aligned our partner ecosystem around hyperscaler marketplaces where we see larger deal sizes and faster deal cycle times” as Kurtz put it – and $150 million in deal value “out of the gate” in its first year on Google Marketplace, the CEO said.
He added: "It is the way customers want to consume. And you have to look at the cloud environments and hyperscalers right now, the larger enterprises are committing more into these marketplaces and cloud providers. And the beauty of the marketplace is that customers can use those dollars to burn down on –and procure CrowdStrike... A lot of it has been focused in North America, but I think the rest of the world really opens up, particularly when you look at some of the cloud environments in different nations and sovereign data requirements and things of that nature. So, we're very optimistic."
