Already discussed many times in our columns, its recurring sales have increased thirty-sixfold since 2018 - the year before its IPO. By 2023, its customer base was still 41% up on the previous fiscal year.

Among these, Crowdstrike already counts more than half of the Fortune 500 and three out of four banks among the top twenty US financial institutions. Excluding the acquisition of new customers, the retention rate for its Falcon software platform exceeds 98%.

Crowdstrike's integrated solution is in the right place at the right time. All IT departments are seeking to simplify their cybersecurity architectures, which are currently fragmented among a number of overly nested service providers. In this context, Falcon's "all-in-one" cachet is not lacking in allure.

Co-founder George Kurtz, moreover, pulls no punches when describing the superiority of his product over Microsoft's Defender platform. This will be the talk of the town for those who have long been speculating about a takeover of the former by the latter.

At the end of last week, the market welcomed Crowdstrike's good quarterly results, accompanied above all by confirmation of the company's three-year target: $5 billion in annual recurring sales, with a 20% operating margin.

Keeping this promise will necessarily involve a paradigm shift. As it stands, Crowdstrike is barely profitable, since remuneration in the form of stock options and the like absorbs 20% of sales. This is a typical example of the American tech bubble, though not the most caricatural.

The current stock market valuation is based on a five-year average of twenty times this year's expected sales. The Austin-based company will have no choice but to stick to its highly ambitious roadmap in order to sustain such a multiple.