SentinelOne Shuts Down Wiz Acquisition Talk: Reports

After venture-backed Wiz had suggested it might be interested in acquiring SentinelOne, the publicly traded company has reportedly terminated an ‘exclusive’ partnership between the two companies.

SentinelOne has ended its “exclusive” partnership with cloud security firm Wiz, in the wake of comments that venture-backed Wiz might seek to become the buyer for publicly traded SentinelOne.

In a statement Wednesday, SentinelOne confirmed earlier media reports that it has terminated the six-month-old collaboration with Wiz.

While SentinelOne is the significantly larger company in terms of revenue and headcount, the cybersecurity vendor’s public market capitalization has plunged since its 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.

[Related: RSAC 2023 Sees Big Moves From SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, Google Cloud, Accenture]

After Wiz released statements to the press saying it might consider pursuing an acquisition of SentinelOne, the once-close partnership between the companies has shattered, according to reports Wednesday from Israel-based media outlets Calcalist and Globes.

SentinelOne’s management sent an email to its sales employees, and to Wiz, on Tuesday informing them about the severing of the partnership that had begun in March, according to Calcalist.

In a statement provided to media outlets including CRN Wednesday, SentinelOne said that it “terminated our re-sell agreement with Wiz as a result of their continued lack of execution against their commitments” and that “the Wiz partnership has not been material to our business.”

Wiz declined to comment Wednesday in response to an inquiry from CRN.

The move 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.

‘Platform Consolidation’

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.

Then on Friday, a report from Bloomberg, which was followed by a Reuters report, indicated that Wiz was considering the idea of pursuing an acquisition of SentinelOne.

Non-Competition Clause

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.

SentinelOne and Wiz have been planning for a number of significant integrations in the future.

The initial integration was around “the ability to get Wiz context data as a threat is detected, via the SentinelOne platform. So that’s a great first part,” Weingarten told CRN in April.

“Because obviously, when someone gets a threat detection or an anomaly detection in the cloud, they want to understand what environment it happened [in] and what is it tied to? And this is just a beautiful capability that [Wiz has] built, which is they can map out the entire thing for you,” he said at the time. “They can stitch together all these different attack paths, or how things are tied [together] in the cloud. So you mesh together the AI-based detection that we do with their full context of the cloud.”

The next stages for the collaboration, Weingarten said in April, would be “to do the opposite as well — so, enrich Wiz’s data with any type of threat data from SentinelOne. Deployment [will be another focus] — so just having the ability to do one-click deployment. Our sellers already are getting up to speed with selling their platform. I think those are our goals for this year.”