In CrowdStrike's Q4 2024 earnings call, cofounder and CEO George Kurtz showcased the vendor's wins over rivals such as Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft and Splunk by replacing or outbidding their cloud security or security information and event management (SIEM) products.

Kurtz cited the following examples, among others:

• In a large seven-figure deal, a global financial services giant replaced its Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud products with CrowdStrike’s Falcon Cloud Security. “The Palo Alto cloud security products required separate management consoles and separate agents because cloud security is on a separate Palo Alto platform altogether. CrowdStrike was able to deliver an expected 70% time reduction in management as well as more than $5 million in annual staffing cost savings,” Kurtz said.
• In an eight-figure transaction, a major chip manufacturer added an identity security module to its CrowdStrike Falcon platform deployment. “Trapped in a large Microsoft ELA [enterprise license agreement], this organization realized Microsoft needed to bring in a startup to augment its current offering … Our single agent and single platform approach reduced their Microsoft dependency,” he said.
• Partnering with Deloitte, the security vendor closed a seven-figure, multiyear SIEM deal with a large European manufacturer, replacing its products from Splunk and Elastic Security, and beating out Microsoft’s Azure Sentinel, which is a cloud-native SIEM solution.
• Competing against Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSIAM security operations platform, CrowdStrike replaced a legacy SIEM vendor with its LogScale next-gen SIEM in a seven-figure multiyear deal.
• A Fortune 500 hospitality brand replaced its Splunk and Microsoft Azure Sentinel solutions with CrowdStrike in a seven-figure deal.

When asked about its competitors’ platformization approach and “no-cost” platform trial, Kurtz argued “Free isn't free. And what customers are saying is more consoles, more point products masquerading as platforms create fatigue in their environment.”

“I've been around the block for a bit,” he added. “I've seen this movie of wrap and roll and bundling together with multiple products that were acquired and last time I saw that I was at McAfee.”

The security vendor has also announced the agreement to acquire cloud data runtime security startup Flow Security without disclosing the financial terms.

Based in Israel, Flow Security raised $13 million in its seed funding round in August 2022. It will bring data security posture management (DSPM) capabilities to CrowdStrike’s Falcon extended detection and response (XDR) platform.

“The majority of companies in cloud data security focus on two things: discovery and classification,” Kurtz said. “Here's where Flow [Security] stands apart: runtime data discovery and classification.”

It offers data leakage prevention and data exfiltration blocking, including the data exposed through generative artificial intelligence (genAI) services, he added.