CrowdStrike reported the positive impact of identity management in its latest earnings, while also announcing a new acquisition in the telemetry space.

The security firm's Q2 2026 results saw it net new annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $221 million. Ending ARR for the quarter was $4.66 billion, representing a 20% year-over-year (YoY) growth.

Total revenue grew 21% YoY to $1.17 billion, with subscription revenue also up 20% YoY to $1.10 billion.

Flexing on customer compensation & retention

During its latest earnings call, founder and CEO George Kurtz highlighted that more than 1,000 customers had now signed up to its Falcon Flex licensing model, with more than 100 contract renewals or "reflexes" to use CrowdStrike parlance, secured in the past quarter alone.

The success of CrowdStrike’s Falcon Flex, however, is offset by the fact that many of its customers were offered licenses as part of compensation packages following its infamous global outage in July of last year.

Kurtz likened the freebies as a way for the vendor to determine demand for the service, telling investors: “A lot of [our CCP program] was delivered through Flex. So we were able to see the market much more rapidly in the Flex licensing mechanism than we would have.

“We leveraged the CCP program, to actually see Flex, and now we have the ability to ‘reflex’ them on those CCP packages as they burn off.”

Crowded identity

Kurtz also revealed that the vendor's identity provision offerings were becoming “a very popular choice” from users taking up CCP packages, reflected in 21% YoY growth for services such as Falcon Shield. This growth exceeded $435 million in ending ARR for the quarter.

August saw CrowdStrike update Falcon’s Next-Gen Identity Security suite with identity and access management (IAM) alongside privileged access management (PAM) details to detect human users, machine accounts, and AI agents on the network. This was in response to AI’s increasing disruption of security through the likes of agentic proliferation on the network.

The release coincided with an expansion of its Falcon service integration with Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange via new managed detection and response (MDR) capabilities.

Both CrowdStrike and Zscaler are acknowledging the growing IAM trend in cybersecurity, as recently highlighted by Palo Alto Networks’ mega-acquisition of identity vendor CyberArk for more than $20 billion.

Kurtz was keen to remind investors, however, that CrowdStrike was not necessarily chasing trends.

“When you look at identity, this is something that we were well ahead of the curve in identifying in 2020, which is why we did the Preempt acquisition. We took the time. We've integrated it. It's a key part of our platform and our fabric today.”

“[Customers] are looking for alternatives … for a next-gen technology that isn't just legacy [but] stitched together. So from the standpoint of identity, we've identified it very early as a key element to solving the security breach problems that are out there.”

Owning Onum

CrowdStrike also announced the acquisition of Onum, a vendor in telemetry pipeline management.

The firm is set to be integrated into CrowdStrike’s threat detection platform, Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, with CEO Kurtz claiming Onum “will stream high-quality, filtered data directly into the platform to drive autonomous cybersecurity at scale”, as both a pipeline and a filter.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed by CrowdStrike, but reports placed the figure at $290 million.

Report updated to include financial details of Onum deal.