SentinelOne Blames Wiz For ‘Lack Of Execution Against Their Commitments’
In a statement, SentinelOne confirmed terminating its exclusive partnership with cloud security firm Wiz — without mentioning Wiz’s recent comments about potentially wanting to acquire SentinelOne.
SentinelOne terminated its exclusive partnership with Wiz due to “lack of execution” by the cloud security firm, the company said in a statement Wednesday.
The statement, which was shared with media outlets including CRN, does not mention Wiz’s recent comments about potential interest in pursuing an acquisition of publicly traded SentinelOne, which is by far the larger cybersecurity vendor but has seen a drop in valuation. A pair of reports Wednesday suggested that the comments by venture-backed Wiz had prompted SentinelOne’s leadership to axe the six-month-old collaboration.
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In the statement Wednesday, SentinelOne said that it “terminated our re-sell agreement with Wiz as a result of their continued lack of execution against their commitments.”
Additionally, “the Wiz partnership has not been material to our business,” SentinelOne said in the statement.
Wiz declined to comment on the SentinelOne statement when reached by CRN Wednesday.
The termination of the SentinelOne-Wiz collaboration was first reported Wednesday by Israel-based media outlets Calcalist and Globes.
While SentinelOne is significantly bigger than Wiz in terms of revenue and headcount, the cybersecurity vendor’s public market capitalization has plunged since its record-setting 2021 IPO. Venture capital backers of Wiz, meanwhile, have valued the three-year-old company at $10 billion, more than double SentinelOne’s current market cap.
On Friday, Wiz had provided comments to media outlets including Bloomberg and Reuters that appeared to signal an openness to exploring an acquisition of SentinelOne.
“Wiz has openly discussed the possibility of acquisition, and we consistently evaluate potential opportunities that will support our business growth and help us maintain our market leadership position,” Wiz said in one of the previously shared statements. “SentinelOne has a strong cybersecurity offering, and we have been following their growth journey for the past several years.”
‘Platform Consolidation’
The dissolution of the collaboration marks a major reversal for the two Israel-founded companies, which have been heavily promoting their exclusive partnership for much of 2023. The partnership included an integration between SentinelOne’s cloud workload protection platform and complementary capabilities from Wiz, including its widely used cloud security posture management technology.
In April, the two companies’ top executives — SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten and Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport — praised the accomplishments of each other’s companies during a joint interview with CRN at the RSA Conference.
Wiz “has built a phenomenal cloud inventory visibility platform, that for a lot of the public cloud users, just gives them unfettered visibility into their entire footprint,” Weingarten told CRN at the time.
Rappaport said at the time that the tight integration between Wiz and SentinelOne could help meet the rising demand for tool consolidation from customers and partners.
While “everybody talks about consolidation,” it doesn’t necessarily need to be vendor consolidation, Rappaport said. Instead, SentinelOne and Wiz are working together to create “platform consolidation [around] how these things work together” to achieve the same improved outcome for partners and customers, he said in April.
Following an 80-percent drop in its market capitalization over the past two years, SentinelOne has been mulling the possibility of a sale and has hired an investment bank, Qatalyst Partners, to assist in the process, Reuters reported on Aug. 21.
The termination of the SentinelOne-Wiz collaboration will have continued implications for the two companies, given that the agreement had been set to last 18 months and is being halted just a third of the way in, Calcalist reported. Because of a non-competition clause in the deal, both SentinelOne and Wiz will be unable to sell products from the other company’s direct competitors, according to the report.