SentinelOne COO: ‘We Do Not Compete With Our Partners’

‘We don’t compete with our managed service providers ... And that really means everything when you’re talking about having a long-lasting business relationship that’s founded on trust and cooperation,’ says SentinelOne’s Nicholas Warner.

SentinelOne sets itself apart from rivals by not offering services that would put the company in competition with its MSSP or incident response partners, according to COO Nicholas Warner.

“Philosophically, we decided to have a posture of enablement and not competition,” Warner told investors Tuesday. “So, we don’t compete with our managed service providers. We don’t compete with our incident response partners. And that really means everything when you’re talking about having a long-lasting business relationship that’s founded on trust and cooperation.”

SentinelOne’s decision to rely on partners for services delivery stands in contrast to rival CrowdStrike, which has a broad portfolio of vendor-delivered assessment, advisory, technical, managed and incident response services. Warner said a lack of channel conflict and robust multi-tenant capabilities has allowed SentinelOne to grow annual recurring revenue from MSSP by 300 percent over the past year.

[Related: SentinelOne CEO: Customers Want A Prevention-First Approach]

“We do not compete with our partners,” said Warner (pictured above). “Instead, we equip them with industry-leading capabilities like multi-tenancy and open APIs.”

CrowdStrike didn’t immediately respond to a CRN request for comment, but CEO George Kurtz said during the company’s earnings call last week that the company’s MSSP business has grown by more than 30 percent quarter over quarter and triple digits year over year. Kurtz dismissed the claim that rivals like SentinelOne are more partner friendly than CrowdStrike as “noise in the system” and “FUD.”

“Our partner opportunities are up,” Kurtz told investors last week. “Our partners are making a lot of money jointly with us. And our goal is to be a partner-first company – and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve been very consistent with that.”

SentinelOne’s Warner called out deep relationships with companies like N-able, AT&T, Pax8, Conitnuum and Kroll for driving the company’s massive year-over-year growth with MSSPs. Growing SentinelOne’s channel community has improved the quality of the company’s leads, with Warner crediting one of the company’s incident response partners for helping SentinelOne win a large airline customer in Asia.

“The reach that we’re unlocking through all these different ecosystems has become a real differentiator for us,” Co-Founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten said in a statement. “We’re using in a good way all these partnership ecosystems to really unlock parts of the TAM that we feel some of the other vendors can’t really teach. And that gives us a very sustainable advantage, and it has unlocked growth over time.”

From a technology standpoint, Warner said SentinelOne’s true multi-tenancy as well as unique capabilities like remote script orchestration (RSO) make life easier for the partner community. Specifically, Warner said that RSO provides MSPs with an automated way to take meaningful real-time action on each and every customer machines.

“We’re essentially engaging and building these force multipliers around the world of channel partners, MSSP folks, as well as incident response companies, all working in conjunction with SentinelOne to help improve security for companies around the world,” Warner said.

SentinelOne’s sales for the quarter ended Oct. 31 skyrocketed to $56 million, up 128.1 percent from $24.6 million a year earlier. That beat analyst earnings projections of $49.58 million.

Net loss worsened to $68.6 million, or $0.26 per diluted share, 127.5 percent greater than a net loss of $30.2 million, or $0.85 per diluted share, a year earlier. On a non-GAAP basis, net loss increased to $39.9 million, or $0.15 per diluted share, 56.3 percent worse than a net loss of $25.6 million, or $0.72 per diluted share, last year. That beat non-GAAP loss estimates of $0.18 per share, Seeking Alpha said.

SentinelOne’s stock fell $4.24 (8.31 percent) to $46.80 in after-hours trading. Earnings were announced after the market closed Tuesday.

In the quarter ended Jan. 31, 2022, SentinelOne expects revenue of between $60 million and $61 million.