SentinelOne IPO: 5 Big Moneymaking Opportunities For Partners

From geographic and vertical expansion to IoT security and asset discovery to managed, forensic and incident response services, here’s where solution providers should place their bets following the SentinelOne IPO.

New Kid On The Block

SentinelOne will today begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange, where the Mountain View, Calif.-based endpoint security upstart is expected to raise $1.02 billion on a valuation of $8.11 billion. A haul of that magnitude would outshine even top rival CrowdStrike, which in June 2019 raised $612 million on a $6.6 billion valuation (CrowdStrike’s now the cream of the cybersecurity crop, worth some $58 billion).

The company was founded in 2013 and has experienced massive growth in recent years, with sales jumping to $93.1 million in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2021, up 100.2 percent from $46.5 million in fiscal 2020. However, the company’s loss surged to $117.6 million in fiscal 2021, or $3.31 per share, in fiscal 2021, 53.6 percent worse than its loss of $76.6 million, or $2.34 per share, in fiscal 2020.

SentinelOne Co-Founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten and COO Nicholas Warner spoke with CRN about the biggest technology and go-to-market investments they’re looking to make with the IPO proceeds. From geographic and vertical expansion to IoT security and asset discovery to managed, forensic and incident response services, here’s where Weingarten and Warner said partners should place their bets.

5. Data Ingestion, Correlation And Analysis

The ability to ingest data from every part of the network is part of SentinelOne’s core strategy, and Weingarten said the company will continue over time to invest in data technology. SentinelOne bought data analytics firm Scalyr for $155 million in February to advance this mission, and Weingarten said further acquisitions are a possibility to grow the company’s portfolio in the data technology space.

Allowing customers to pour more data into SentinelOne’s data lake and enjoy the same capabilities available today around endpoint protection and cloud protection looks like the next logical step for how customers would want to use such a data-rich platform, Weingarten said. Specifically, he said customers are looking for house data for longer given the requirements and benefits around data retention.

SentinelOne is now reaching the point where the amount of data collected and accumulated on the company’s platform is along the lines of what people would typically find from a more data-oriented offering, Weingarten said. As customers generate more data and look for ways to store more data in a more secure fashion, Weingarten said SentinelOne wants to serve customers in the best way possible.

Smart City

4. Geographic And Vertical Expansion

SentinelOne plans to continue pouring resources into growing its sales and marketing team to support geographic expansion, Warner said. Europe, the Middle East and Africa has been a particular area of focus and success for SentinelOne, he said, and the company also plans to keep investing throughout Asia-Pacific. International sales accounted for 30 percent of SentinelOne’s revenue in fiscal 2021.

Warner said the company has also put a lot of time and attention into building out a public sector team, inking agreements with best-in-class distributors that service the federal government like Carahsoft, No. 15 on the 2021 CRN Solution Provider 500. SentinelOne’s efforts to grow within the U.S. federal government should be aided by the company’s FedRAMP certification, which it received last year.

In addition, SentinelOne last week named former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Chris Krebs as the first member of its advisory board, where he will help federal, national, and enterprise organizations defend against ransomware and the evolving threat landscape. Warner said Krebs is deeply respected and very influential in the federal government arena.

3. IoT Security And Asset Discovery

The ability for partners to discover all the devices and assets in an organization is something that would be incredibly useful for their end customers, and Weingarten said that capability is seamlessly delivered through the cloud using SentinelOne’s platform. Businesses can’t protect what they can’t see, and Weingarten said many of the recent high-profile compromised have started with unprotected assets.

SentinelOne has the unique ability to provide customers with visibility into every part of their network using a super-efficient tool that doesn’t require any deployment outlay. In addition, Weingarten said SentinelOne’s Ranger Deploy module allows customers to automatically deploy security software in a peer-to-peer fashion to every part of their unmanaged estate, including rogue devices.

By doubling down on IoT security and asset discovery, Weingarten said partners can create a better security posture for their customers while at the same time reducing their attack surface. All told, Warner said the company has now built out eight different Ranger modules that partners and customers can adopt to enhance their IoT visibility and control.

2. Multi-Tenancy, APIs And No Channel Conflict

SentinelOne is the only next-generation security vendor offering the channel true multi-tenancy, which Warner said is table stakes for managed service partners. Managed detection and response (MDR) partners, meanwhile, love that SentinelOne has a completely API-driven architecture, meaning that MDRs can build their own custom workflows around the company’s technology, according to Warner.

For instance, Warner said that SentinelOne partner ReliaQuest has their own custom user interface, dashboards and platform that can be seamlessly snapped right into SentinelOne’s Singularity platform. Meanwhile, he said incident response firms benefit from SentinelOne’s combination of cloud-native technology, automatic remediation, best-in-class prevention, and modern EDR analytics and hunting.

Warner said SentinelOne opted not to build out a huge incident response (IR) services team in hopes of capturing 10 percent of the market and has instead partnered with the other 90 percent of the IR market. This has allowed SentinelOne to capitalize on their large, established brands, their experienced salesforce, and the retainers they already have in place some of the world’s most prominent companies.

1. Managed, Forensic And Incident Response Services

SentinelOne’s channel partners have started to layer managed, forensic, and incident response services that complement the company’s technology into their own practice, Warner said. “We want to enable, not compete with all the different parts of our channel community,” Warner said. “And I think that really shows in terms of the growth that we‘ve seen and the affinity that we have on the partner side.”

Warner said SentinelOne’s channel enablement efforts will go beyond the company’s technology platform and identify back-end services that partners can either resell directly or incorporate into an existing services bundle. The company wants to push its enablement capabilities beyond the managed services space and into the managed detection and response (MDR) and incident response spaces.

Following the IPO, Warner said SentinelOne is looking to establish a partner summit for its more than 1,000 reseller, distribution, and channel partners as well as regional partner meetings on a more regular basis. Channel partners brought in 96 percent of SentinelOne’s revenue in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2021, up from 92 percent of revenue in fiscal 2020, the company told regulators earlier this month.