What happened
Just three weeks after cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike (CRWD +2.76%) announced it would partner with cloud computing company Cloudflare (NET 1.26%) to toughen up the digital defenses offered by both companies, CrowdStrike announced Thursday it had struck yet another partnership.
As of 11:05 a.m. ET, the news had sent CrowdStrike's stock price 3.1% higher on a down day for the market.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
CrowdStrike's newest partner is Mandiant (MNDT +0.00%), the cybersecurity business formerly known as FireEye, which Alphabet (GOOG 2.62%) (GOOGL 2.98%) agreed to buy last month. And don't get confused by the alphabet soup of tech names. The upshot here is that CrowdStrike just struck up a partnership with one of the biggest names in tech: Google.
"CrowdStrike has worked with Mandiant many times over the years and there is a mutual respect for the caliber of technical and team expertise we both bring to the fight," said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. With their partnership now made official -- and expanded through the inclusion of Alphabet -- they'll now cooperate even more to "investigate, remediate and defend against increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity events that plague organizations globally."
Now what
While CrowdStrike's stock reacted noticeably to this news, Mandiant's stock didn't. That's not an indication that the partnership isn't important. It's simply a consequence of the fact that Mandiant's stock price is range-bound by what Alphabet will pay for it when it closes its acquisition of the company -- $23 per share.
It's the movement of CrowdStrike's share price relative to the broader market that tells you how big of a deal this partnership really is. It appears investors agree that this really is good news for the company.
