It remains difficult to tell the financial impact of the CrowdStrike outage that affected millions of computers worldwide in July.
This is evident from the presentation of financial figures for the quarter ending in October. CrowdStrike says it simply does not know how the outage will affect revenue in the long term. CFO Burt Podbere notes that since the incident, customers have been reluctant to discuss contract renewals and are postponing purchase decisions.
“I think we’re still going to see extended sales cycles for both new and existing customers,” Podbere states. “I think customers have additional scrutiny, additional layers of approvals, all that sort of thing.”
Subscriptions should convince customers
CrowdStrike is capitalizing on this with special product packages, including options for flexible payment plans and subscription extensions. These packages proved popular over the past three months. “We saw incredible success with our customer commitment packages as customers embraced the program and chose to deepen their relationship with CrowdStrike,” Podbere said.
Still, Podbere remains cautious. Only the next quarter will reveal more about the real impact. According to him, CrowdStrike may face a higher than usual level of contraction.
In the past quarter, the company achieved revenues of $1.01 billion (nearly 960 million euros), a 29 percent year-on-year growth. For the current fourth quarter, CrowdStrike expects annual revenue between $3.92 billion and $3.93 billion, higher than its previous forecast of up to $3.9 billion.
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