SentinelOne CEO: Partners unsure of BlackBerry's plans for Cylance
Tomer Weingarten talks to CRN about taking staff from its competitor and bolstering its UK operations
End-point security vendor SentinelOne has been taking advantage of the uncertainty caused by BlackBerry's acquisition of Cylance, according to CEO Tomer Weingarten.
He told CRN that the surprise purchase of its end-point protection rival has caused incertitude in the channel that he is keen to take advantage of.
"Cylance was definitely a competitor of ours, but its technology was always very focused on a very specific part of the problem," he said.
"Whereas today, you see that people are really opting for a broad-based platform, and we're a very broad-based platform, so Cylance is becoming less of a competitor to us.
"I think we're seeing some of the channel ecosystems unsure of what BlackBerry wants to do with Cylance, so they're kind of moving away from them - which is obviously a positive for us."
Former Cylance exec Tim Mackie was appointed VP of worldwide channels at SentinelOne in March, and Weingarten noted that such a move was "only natural" for employees of an acquired company.
"That dynamic always exists when a company is acquired, and people are unsure of what the level of investment in technology is going to be and whether the product line is actually going to survive and continue, and what's going to be the focus of the acquiring company," he explained.
"You can imagine that there's at least a number of accounts that are worried about that and there are going to be some employees who would be looking to leave, and Cylance has some great talent.
"Folks like Tim Mackie are looking for the next part in their journey and would love to join a company like ours, which is just exploding and growing at a very fast pace and bringing a very different technology into the market."
This desire to benefit from channel uncertainty around Cylance is playing a part in SentinelOne's plans to bolster its presence in the UK.
The vendor currently works with 10 partners in the UK, ranging from systems integrators to boutique cybersecurity companies.
"We are the youngest company in end-point protection," the security boss explained.
"[When building] a company, it's about focusing on where we can extract the most and where we felt were very strategic territories for us, and gradually expanding to other territories.
"You'll definitely see us doubling down in territories that we have yet to really focus on and the UK is becoming increasingly more strategic for us.
"We have some great partners in the UK; we work with Exclusive Networks as our distributors. So we feel there's a lot to be had and with that, we're going to double down.
"We absolutely plan to beef up operations globally. The EMEA region is one area where we have some really nice lighthouse customers and now we feel we can really expand our footprint."