Are New AI Partnerships Powering CrowdStrike's Next Growth Wave?

Core Insights - CrowdStrike is enhancing its AI-focused partnerships to expand as a comprehensive cybersecurity platform, with approximately 60% of new business in Q2 of fiscal 2026 generated through these partnerships [1][11] - Recent collaborations with CoreWeave, EY, and NVIDIA emphasize CrowdStrike's commitment to securing AI workloads and modernizing security operations for real-time threat detection [1][11] Partnership Developments - The partnership with CoreWeave integrates Falcon security into CoreWeave's AI cloud, allowing CrowdStrike to protect the entire AI ecosystem where models are built, trained, and deployed [2] - EY has chosen CrowdStrike's Falcon Next-Gen Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as the foundation for its global managed services, indicating strong growth potential for CrowdStrike's Next-Gen SIEM business, which saw a more than 95% year-over-year increase in annual recurring revenues, exceeding $430 million [3] - The collaboration with NVIDIA aims to deliver continuously learning AI agents for real-time threat detection across various environments, aligning with the growth of CrowdStrike's Charlotte AI, which increased over 85% from the previous quarter [4] Growth Prospects - The partnerships are expected to bolster CrowdStrike's platform strategy and enhance adoption across its offerings, contributing to a projected revenue growth of around 21% year-over-year for fiscal 2026 and 2027 according to the Zacks Consensus Estimate [5] Competitive Landscape - Key competitors such as Palo Alto Networks and Okta are also focusing on acquisitions to enhance their platforms and drive AI innovation [6] - Palo Alto Networks is pursuing the acquisition of CyberArk Software to strengthen its identity-driven threat protection capabilities [7] - Okta's acquisition of Axiom Security aims to enhance its privileged access management tools [8] Financial Performance - CrowdStrike's shares have increased by 43.4% year-to-date, outperforming the Zacks Security industry's growth of 11.2% [9] - The company is currently trading at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 21.97, significantly higher than the industry average of 11.97 [13] - The Zacks Consensus Estimate indicates a projected earnings decline of 6.6% for fiscal 2026, followed by a growth of 29.3% for fiscal 2027, with estimates remaining unchanged over the past 60 days [16]