SentinelOne's relationships with VARs, strategic partners, incident response providers and MSSPs remain in rapid growth mode, the cybersecurity company indicated during an earnings call with Wall Street analysts on August 31, 2022.
"Our growing network of incident response partners engaged with a record number of new breaches in the second quarter," SentinelOne President Nick Warner said. "These partnerships continue to create high-value and fast-moving opportunities every quarter."
Shifting to MSSPs, Warner touted SentinelOne's Singularity XDR strategy -- which offers MSPs and MSSPs multi-tenancy, customizable role-based access control and a full set of open and documented APIs, he asserted.
"In Q2, our partner supported go-to-market model helped us achieve record customer additions and NRR
SentinelOne: MSSPs, VARs Extend to MDR Services
Many of those MSSP partners, he added, have become managed detection and response (MDR) providers. "And I think there's a couple of fascinating elements to this part of the business," Warner said. "One, it really lets us, in a very efficient way, cover a tremendous part of the market. Two, it absolutely fits amazingly well in today's macro environment where folks are looking to efficiently protect their networks, efficiently protect their data and their users and expand their security prowess without having to make a lot of capital investments. And managed services do exactly that. Third is incredible velocity in terms of deal cycles."
Still, the partner strategy involves more than MSSPs and IR companies. "We really have a kind of balanced ecosystem of partners," CEO Tomer Weingarten said. "We really have the VARs on one end, along with integrators, IR partners, MDRs and MSSPs on the other end. So it's a very balanced portfolio of different avenues to market that we leverage."
Warner also touched on SentinelOne's commitment to avoid channel conflict. "I think what's really starting to resonate, even at the national level with large resellers, is how we don't compete with our partners -- we enable them," he said. "So we don't have competing lines of business. We don't try to compete with them on IR. We don't try to compete with them as it relates to MSP and MSSP. And that matters, and that really matters in a world where resellers are really looking to then subsequently manage many of the products that they're reselling to their customers."'
What MSSPs Say About SentinelOne: Take a closer look, and you may notice that SentinelOne is emerging as a top security software provider to MSSPs, according to MSSP Alert's own research — which we’ll roll out during our September 15 webcast and at the MSSP Alert Live 2022 conference (September 19-21, Washington, D.C.).
SentinelOne Financial Results: A Closer Look
SentinelOne's business performance metrics in Q2 of fiscal 2023 included:
- A new organic customer growth record that included more than 750 new customers in addition to over 350 customers from the Attivo acquisition of Attivo.
- Expanding the company's overall market reach to more than 8,600.
- Roughly 755 customers now spend more than $100,000 per year (measured in annual recurring revenue) with SentinelOne, up 117% from the corresponding quarter last year.
- Net revenue retention (NRR) reached a new record of 137%, which essentially means existing customers remain loyal to SentinelOne and many of them continue to grow their spend with the security company.
CrowdStrike vs. SentinelOne: Upcoming Security Conferences
Still, competition remains fierce. The evidence: CrowdStrike’s revenue driven by MSSP partners has grown more than 150% year-over-year, the company said in August 2022. During CrowdStrike's earnings call, CEO George Kurtz insisted that the software company does not compete with partners even as CrowdStrike continues to expand its own MDR services.
Kurtz described rumors of channel conflict as FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) spread by some competitors.
So what's next? Keep an eye on CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 2022 security conference -- which is set for mid-September. Also, the SentinelOne LabsCon 2022 is scheduled for later in the month.
