CrowdStrike stock (CRWD) is up 56% since the beginning of this year. But it’s a different story over the last 12 months, with shares of the cybersecurity company facing a decline of over 4%.
What gives? We’re in the midst of the artificial intelligence boom, and theoretically, it should be riding this AI wave along with other tech companies.
In part, the answer is that CrowdStrike is seeing competition from one of the biggest names in tech: Microsoft (MSFT).
“Microsoft is always going to be a competitor out there,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Tech Conference in San Francisco. “I think, over time, we’ve seen it come and go in certain industries. … And you can never discount Microsoft Azure’s capabilities.”
Yet there are some important distinctions between the tech rivals, Kurtz added.
“Fundamentally, they create applications, and fundamentally, they’re one of the three large cloud providers, and that’s where they’re spending their time and effort,” he said. “Every day, we wake up and we’re thinking, ‘How do we protect our customers?'”
He also suggested that CrowdStrike’s independence is an asset more than a liability when compared to Microsoft, especially as vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s software become a growing concern.
“Customers are looking for someone who’s independent,” Kurtz said. “A lot of customers are saying, ‘Okay, we have to use Microsoft, the big player,’ but they don’t want the fox guarding the hen house, and they’re looking for other technologies to be able to provide a broader platform, particularly in security.”
In the end, being a CrowdStrike customer and a Microsoft customer aren’t “mutually exclusive,” Kurtz said.
Still, in the near term, he affirmed CrowdStrike is set up to benefit from its M&A strategy.
“It’s always going to be competitive,” Kurtz told the audience. “I think we’re going to be the beneficiaries of some of the movement and noise in the market that we see today, and I think when you look at what we’re doing from a consolidation perspective, the consolidators are going to win and I think that’s going to allow us to compete more effectively in the back half of the year.”
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Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks and on LinkedIn.
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