Can Strategic Partnerships Drive CrowdStrike's Next Growth Phase?

CrowdStrike Holdings CRWD is using partnerships to support growth and expand its reach. The company’s recent partnerships with Qualtrics, Microsoft, NordVPN and Saudi Aramco demonstrate how CrowdStrike is using various collaborations to expand the reach of its Falcon platform to secure SaaS applications, cloud procurement, consumer security and critical infrastructure.

CrowdStrike recently integrated Falcon Shield with the Qualtrics XM platform. This allows security teams to track user activity, permissions and data access inside Qualtrics, which is mainly used for customer and employee experience programs that handle sensitive data. Through this partnership, CrowdStrike aims to expand its Falcon Shield protection into a business-critical SaaS application, which creates a path to provide SaaS security to Qualtrics customers.

CrowdStrike also expanded its partnership with Microsoft by making the Falcon platform available on Microsoft Marketplace, through which customers can now buy Falcon using their existing Microsoft Azure consumption commitments. This makes it easier for customers to deploy and expand Falcon across endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data.

Other partnerships extend CrowdStrike’s reach in different ways. CrowdStrike's partnership with NordVPN enables CrowdStrike to provide threat intelligence to protect millions of NordVPN consumer users. CrowdStrike also signed a memorandum of understanding with Aramco in Saudi Arabia to explore long-term collaboration on protecting Saudi Arabia’s critical infrastructure and supporting Saudi Arabia’s cybersecurity goals.

If CrowdStrike can turn partner-led adoption into recurring platform use and expansion, the above-mentioned partnerships could support its long-term prospects, helping the company scale faster and support its next stage of growth. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for both fiscal 2026 and 2027 revenues indicates a year-over-year increase of around 22%.

How Competitors Fare Against CRWD

Palo Alto Networks PANW and Zscaler ZS are key players competing with CrowdStrike, which are focusing on partnerships and acquisitions for platform expansion and AI innovation.

In December 2025, Palo Alto Networks announced that it is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud. Prisma AIRS is being integrated with Google Cloud services, such as Vertex AI and Agent Engine. This allows customers to secure AI workloads from development through production.

In early February, Zscaler completed its acquisition of SqareX. Through this acquisition, Zscaler aims to improve browser-based security as companies deal with more AI-driven risks. The goal is to secure users working on any browser and any device without needing special enterprise browsers.

CRWD’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of CrowdStrike have lost 7.2% in the past six months compared with the Zacks Security industry’s decline of 15.4%.

CRWD 6-Month Price Return Performance

From a valuation standpoint, CrowdStrike trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 16.56, way higher than the industry’s average of 9.95.

CRWD Forward 12-Month P/S Ratio

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for CrowdStrike’s fiscal 2026 earnings implies a year-over-year decline of 5.3%, while the same for fiscal 2027 earnings indicates year-over-year growth of 30.5%. The estimates for fiscal 2026 have been revised upward by a penny over the past 30 days, while the estimates for fiscal 2027 have been revised upward by a penny over the past seven days.

CrowdStrike currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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