SentinelOne: ‘Our bread and butter is still the endpoint. It’s never going away’

VP of technology partnerships and strategic initiatives Melissa K. Smith says the vendor’s key focus is on products and partners

SentinelOne is reshaping its partner strategy with a focus on execution and value creation, as the cybersecurity vendor looks to capitalise on growing market demand while navigating industry challenges.

Melissa K. Smith, VP of technology partnerships and strategic initiatives at SentinelOne, is leading the charge to transform how the company approaches its partner ecosystem.

Appointed in October, her remit spans technology partnerships, the integration ecosystem, OEM business, and the global Lenovo relationship.

She tells CRN top of her priority list right now is simply “level setting.”

“Prior to joining there was a passion for partnerships but not for execution,” she says.

“So we’ve worked on formalising a structure that aligns with the new SentinelOne partner programme.”

She recognises the challenge of competing with established partner programmes while bringing something distinctive to market.

“There's a lot of reputable partner programmes that have been around a lot longer. You're trying to keep up with parity.

“But if we only had parity with our competitors then we wouldn’t be bringing something novel to the market.

“The second half of the calendar year we're looking at our top tier partners and doubling down on building unique, novel solutions that bring additional value and help our resellers close deals much faster.”

Endpoint security remains core

Despite expanding into broader cybersecurity domains, SentinelOne maintains its commitment to endpoint security.

“Our bread and butter is still the endpoint. It’s never going away,” Smith asserts.

“And so you will see a revitalised effort in our marketing and in our evangelism around the endpoint.”

Strategic partner selection

SentinelOne currently works with 70 active channel partners in the UK.

Smith reveals the vendor is focused on a core group of these channel partners.

“It's great to have a large ecosystem, but you can only bring value and go wide and deep with so many,” she explains.

“Therefore, prioritisation is key.

“MSPs and MSSPs are a huge swath of our business and we're continuing to validate critical alignment with those partners, but we are very choosy.

“It is a complicated business from a technical and a delivery standpoint.

“We have to remember how those partners can be valuable to us, and help us with our target addressable market and new customer acquisition.”

An area SentinelOne is looking for help from partners is in the public sector business, which is bearing fruit owing to the spike in major cyber attacks.

“We have a growing public sector business in the UK and Europe which is unfortunately being driven by cybersecurity and the attacks in the news.

“One of our limitations is sometimes lack of frameworks of what we’re growing.

“So those partners that can help us get on those frameworks so we can expand our public business are critical.”

She adds that channel alignment alongside technology partners is going to be an ongoing strategy for SentinelOne moving forward.

“And I don’t want to forget the importance of cloud security providers in the UK,” Smith continues.

Following the CrowdStrike-caused outage in July last year, SentinelOne was touted to be well positioned to see further gains in cloud security market share, according to a TD Cowen analyst.

“Google and AWS are very critical to our success in driving that ease and flexibility of purchasing through those marketplaces.”

Market challenges

SentinelOne is grappling with the current, industry-wide challenge of delayed customer spend which is affecting tech purchasing.

"The challenges we're facing right now are not unique to any organisation," Smith acknowledges. "We're all being faced with a global buying slow down and there's no silver bullet that can solve that."

Despite these headwinds, Smith remains optimistic about the cybersecurity market's fundamental growth drivers.

"Cybersecurity, unfortunately, is a growing business because the adversary is always going to adversary," she notes.

"Those threat actors are out there, and they are emboldened to continue to drive their business, which makes money for them, which means we have to continue to be at the forefront of the cyber battleground."