Title: 💻 Software Strikes Back — CrowdStrike accelerates while Salesforce starts to turn Show: How They Make Money / App Economy Insights (Substack, Premium edition) Author: Bertrand (App Economy Insights) Date: 2026-08-26 (AUG 26, 2026) URL: https://www.appeconomyinsights.com/p/software-strikes-back Note: Written post — no timestamps. PAID (Premium) post; body captured via Stephen's logged-in session. Verbatim body below (boilerplate trimmed).
Software finally had a good night
Investors have spent much of the year questioning whether AI will accelerate software growth or slowly eat into it.
On Wednesday, two of the industry's biggest names gave them something else to think about.
CrowdStrike delivered record net new ARR and raised its outlook again. Salesforce posted its strongest new business growth in four years and pointed to organic revenue reacceleration ahead. Both stocks surged more than 10% after hours.
But the more interesting part is where the growth is showing up and what the market may have missed by lumping all software into the same basket.
Today at a glance: 🦅 CrowdStrike: What Doesn't Kill It ☁️ Salesforce: SaaSpocalypse Pushback
🦅 CrowdStrike: What Doesn't Kill It
For years, the CrowdStrike investment thesis has been that every new threat makes Threat Graph, the AI brain behind Falcon, smarter. The past two years suggest something similar about the company itself.
In July 2024, a faulty update caused one of the largest IT outages in history and put customer trust under extraordinary pressure. Two years later, CrowdStrike just delivered what CEO George Kurtz called the best quarter in company history.
Revenue grew 26% Y/Y to $1.47 billion ($30 million beat), marking the fifth consecutive quarter of acceleration, while non-GAAP EPS reached $0.31 ($0.02 beat).
Non-GAAP operating income jumped 46% to a record $372 million, a 25% margin, while free cash flow reached a Q2 record $377 million, up 33% Y/Y.
The GAAP picture remains less flattering, with the company still showing an operating loss margin of 2%. The main reason was stock-based compensation, which accounted for roughly 26% of revenue.
The recurring-revenue engine remains the main KPI:
Ending ARR grew 25% Y/Y to $5.84 billion, continuing a remarkably predictable trajectory.
Net new ARR reached an all-time record $333 million, up 51% Y/Y, accelerating sharply from +32% last quarter. New-logo net new ARR also hit a record, while both gross and net retention improved, showing that the acceleration extends beyond existing customers buying more modules.
The Flex Flywheel
Ending ARR from Flex customers surged 101% Y/Y to $2.29 billion, already approaching 40% of CrowdStrike's total ARR. More than 935 accounts adopted Flex during the quarter.
Customers moving to Flex increased ending ARR by roughly 40% on average, while platform adoption continued to deepen.
The appeal of Flex is simple: customers commit a security budget upfront and can deploy it across Falcon modules over time, making it easier for CrowdStrike to consolidate more security workloads onto a single platform.
AI Creates More to Secure
The Mythos moment we discussed last quarter is also becoming clearer in the numbers.
As enterprises deploy autonomous agents that can access files, call APIs, and interact with critical systems, every agent effectively becomes another identity and another attack surface.
That opportunity is starting to show up in newer products:
AIDR (AI Detection and Response): Ending ARR nearly tripled Q/Q, with management saying adoption is running well ahead of expectations. CrowdStrike still believes the category could eventually exceed EDR as AI agents proliferate.
Next-Gen SIEM surpassed $695 million in ending ARR, as CrowdStrike continues displacing legacy security analytics platforms.
This is what makes AI particularly interesting for the CrowdStrike thesis. The company does not need AI to become a huge standalone revenue stream overnight. More AI workloads, agents, identities, and applications simply expand the surface area that enterprises need to secure.
Guidance
Management raised the outlook again. FY27 revenue is now expected to reach $6.00 billion at the midpoint (~$65 million raise).
More importantly, management now expects net new ARR to grow 34% this year, up from just 22.5% when FY27 began. CrowdStrike has effectively moved its outlook from low-20s to mid-30s growth in only six months.
Takeaway: CrowdStrike has gone from surviving the mother of all IT outages to posting record new business and accelerating net new ARR growth to 51%. Falcon Flex is driving broader platform consolidation while AI keeps creating more identities, workloads, and attack surfaces to secure. Now the debate shifts to how durable this new growth cycle can be and whether it can justify its current valuation above 100x forward EBITDA.
☁️ Salesforce: SaaSpocalypse Pushback
Marc Benioff used the earnings call to describe the SaaSpocalypse as "nonsense." For once, the numbers gave him a decent case.
Salesforce's current revenue isn't reaccelerating yet. Strip out the $456 million contribution from Informatica, and organic revenue grew only about 6% Y/Y.
But the forward indicators finally moved in the right direction. Current RPO growth accelerated to 14% in constant currency (although Salesforce does not disclose how much of that growth is attributable to Informatica). Net new annual order value grew at its fastest pace in four years, and attrition remained near record lows.
The second-half reacceleration remains to be seen, but there is finally evidence underneath it, even though acquisitions will make it hard to read cleanly.
The quarter in numbers:
Revenue grew 11% Y/Y to $11.35 billion ($30 million beat), including $456 million from Informatica.
cRPO: +14% Y/Y in constant currency to $33.5 billion, up from +13% last quarter.
Operating margin: 20.5% on a GAAP basis and 34.1% non-GAAP.
Free cash flow: +81% Y/Y to $1.1 billion.
Non-GAAP EPS: $5.90, but $2.53 of EPS came from gains on strategic investments. Excluding that windfall, EPS was roughly $3.37 ($0.10 beat).
The new revenue segmentation also shows where growth is concentrated. Agentforce Apps grew about 8% Y/Y, while Data 360, Headless Platform, and Other grew 21%, although that faster bucket now includes Informatica.
AI Metrics Get More Useful
Last quarter, Salesforce buried investors under tokens, records, and Agentic Work Units without providing much clarity on what all that usage meant financially.
This quarter was better. Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5 billion, while Agentforce and Data 360 combined reached nearly $3.9 billion, up more than 210% Y/Y. Agentic Work Units grew 97% Q/Q, and bookings for Agentforce One Edition and Agentforce for Apps more than doubled sequentially.
There is one caveat: Salesforce expanded its definition of Agentforce ARR this quarter to include Slackbot and Headless 360, making the sequential jump from $1.2 billion less clean than it appears.
Still, bookings growth is more useful than another trillion-token statistic. It suggests customers are increasingly paying for AI functionality rather than merely experimenting with it.
Claudeforce Makes It Real
Salesforce knows that AI agents may eventually replace much of the traditional software interface. With Headless 360, its response is essentially: fine, let the interface disappear.
The goal is to make Salesforce's data, workflows, permissions, and business logic available to whatever agent customers choose, without requiring Salesforce's traditional application interface.
That strategy became much more tangible with Claudeforce, an expanded partnership with Anthropic. Claude can now access Salesforce customer data and execute Salesforce workflows directly from its own interface.
The concern has been that Salesforce could become the data layer behind someone else's agent. Increasingly, that appears to be the strategy rather than the risk.
Salesforce doesn't necessarily need employees clicking through Sales Cloud all day if Claude, ChatGPT, or another agent is still calling Salesforce behind the scenes. Those interactions can drive consumption and push customers toward higher-value plans.
The interface can change. Salesforce needs to make sure the meter keeps running.
The Reacceleration Test
Management raised FY27 revenue guidance by $200 million to $46.1–$46.4 billion, but the headline increase deserves some unpacking.
The raise includes $200 million from the pending Contentful and Fin acquisitions, partly offset by a $100 million FX headwind. The actual improvement to the organic outlook is only about $100 million.
Q3 revenue is expected to grow 11%–12%, including slightly more than four percentage points from Informatica, while cRPO is expected to remain around 14% in constant currency, making it the main KPI to watch for signs of broader demand reacceleration.
So Salesforce hasn't reached organic reacceleration yet. What has changed is that the leading indicators are finally pointing toward it.
Takeaway: AI monetization is becoming more tangible, while Claudeforce makes the Headless 360 strategy much easier to understand. Salesforce may not need to own the interface of the AI era if it can remain the data and workflow layer underneath it. The SaaSpocalypse debate isn't settled. But Salesforce finally has more than AI usage statistics to fight back.
Disclosure: I own CRM and CRWD in App Economy Portfolio. I share my ratings (BUY, SELL, or HOLD) with App Economy Portfolio members.