CrowdStrike is expanding the reach of its Project QuiltWorks cyberdefense alliance. Just four months after launching the initiative for large enterprises, the cybersecurity vendor wants to reach small and midsized businesses through distributors, managed service providers and other channel firms. Project QuiltWorks’s launch partners included Accenture, EY, IBM, Kroll and OpenAI. The aim was to integrate CrowdStrike’s AI-driven vulnerability discovery capabilities with systems integration expertise and input from LLM labs OpenAI and Anthropic to deploy enterprise-grade protection. In early August, the company corralled Arrow Electronics, Pax8, TD Synnex and several other channel firms to mobilize the midmarket push. The move comes amid a wave of interest in SMB opportunities. Earlier this year, Accenture rolled out a business unit focused on midmarket organizations to compete with smaller MSPs. CrowdStrike and other large security vendors have tailored cyber management platforms for smaller enterprises, leaning on partners to reach customers they can’t efficiently serve on their own. For CrowdStrike, the calculation comes down largely to reaching more organizations and capitalizing on the specialized services its partners provide. “The core of what we’re trying to unlock here is scale,” Dan Danielli, CrowdStrike VP of scale partnerships, told Channel Dive. “We can’t be in every single conversation in every corner of the globe.” Partners have rapport and opportunities with SMBs that CrowdStrike wants to tap as those organizations adopt AI. “What we also understood was that we needed to put the partner at the forefront of the conversation because they were having multiple touchpoints with customers that oftentimes went way beyond security,” Danielli said. Platform support CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform provides the common technology layer underneath QuiltWorks. The cloud-native security platform covers endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data. Within QuiltWorks, partners use Falcon and their own services to assess customers’ security posture, identify and prioritize