Partnering for Success | A Q&A with Brian Lanigan, SVP of Partner Ecosystem, SentinelOne

As a partner-driven organization, SentinelOne recognizes the critical role that partners play in securing our digital world. Partners are instrumental in helping customers understand how to break through the noise and recommending the best solutions to help solve their toughest security challenges, and businesses are increasingly turning to managed security to elevate protection, address cybersecurity talent shortages and better align cost structures. SentinelOne has a robust and powerful partner ecosystem that is a key differentiator for us, spanning MSSPs, incident response providers, and other strategic partners. We have a massive opportunity to expand our business and execute our mission to secure tomorrow.

Two months ago, we brought in Brian Lanigan, a seasoned leader with proven experience building and managing global sales teams that consistently over-achieve, to help us capitalize on this opportunity. He’s wasted no time putting the pieces in place to create a better experience and stronger engagement with partners across our ecosystem that drives our mutual success. We sat down with Brian to talk about his plans.

Welcome Brian Lanigan, SVP of Partner Ecosystem, SentinelOne

Brian joined us from Lacework, where he was the Worldwide Channels and Alliances leader, evolving the predominantly direct model to an 85 percent partner-aligned business. He helped establish Lacework as a top 20 AWS partner and the Cloud Security offering for six of the top eight MDR providers.

Prior to Lacework, Brian served as the head of global strategic alliances at Splunk, where he helped build the partner ecosystem as the business scaled from $200 million to $2.6 billion and led the teams that built:

• The MSP RTM, leading to a $150 million ARR business
• The GSI partner ecosystem, establishing the Accenture-Splunk business group
• The AWS partnership, accelerating Splunk to a top five AWS Partner
• The OEM business, establishing Splunk as the core data collection engine to many leading independent software vendors

What drew you to SentinelOne?

SentinelOne has a clear vision that meets the moment: Secure every surface, every minute of every day. It has the best technology in the industry to make it a reality. That was the first draw. The second was the sheer opportunity for both the company and its partners. The market for AI security services is massive and ripe for disruption. Together with our partners, we can move from securing endpoints and delivering MDR, into full business protection, across all security products leveraging our multi-tenanted data lake and Purple AI technology to manage across silos.

How will you do this?

Superior technology is the foundation of how we help our partners and customers build more resilient enterprises, and we will continue to invest in innovation that enables them to scale and remain ahead of adversaries now and into the future.

We just announced new capabilities within our Singularity Platform designed to democratize advanced cybersecurity operations through AI and automation. At the heart of these capabilities is Purple AI. Beyond a chatbot or virtual assistant, Purple AI is an advanced AI security solution that not only creates complex data queries from natural language, but anticipates what security analysts need to do and recommends next steps. It is the only Sec AI offering that is multi-tenanted and can be used horizontally across multiple sites, and we will leverage it to help our partners accelerate and scale their current services with hyper efficiency.

Cloud security is an important and growing part of our business and that of our partners, and we’re doubling down on investment to expanding our capabilities in this area as well, as evidenced by our recent launch of Singularity Cloud Native Security, which when combined with our AI-powered Cloud Workload Security and Cloud Data Security threat protection products, delivers visibility and mitigation capabilities in a single cloud security platform.

SentinelOne has evolved from an endpoint company to a platform. How is our go-to-market strategy evolving to accommodate this shift?

Point solutions are falling out of favor. Customers are seeking to consolidate not only their security vendors, but also their security consoles and data in order to gain a unified view of the enterprise security landscape.

Enterprises need a specialized security approach centered on all enterprise data to prevent attacks. This is where SentinelOne stands out. Disjointed platforms do not result in better protection. Bigger brands do not mean better security. SentinelOne is a true, unified AI security platform that seamlessly aggregates and connects data from all security products in a single streamlined technology and interface, and we make it easy for our partners to build on top of it to expand their offerings and unlock new opportunities in huge total addressable markets.

How are you aligning your organization to capitalize on these opportunities?

Our partner ecosystem is second-to-none and we are constantly adapting our organization to ensure we are creating a world-class experience for our partners that fuels their success, because at the end of the day, their success is our success. We’re focused on embracing the totality of the SentinelOne ecosystem in a harmonized manner – from value added resellers, distributors, systems integrators and cloud service providers to IR and technical alliance partners, MSSPs and MDRs.

We are investing in the partners that invest with us, focusing on those that have the joint vision to deliver outcomes for our customers. Further, we’re creating a sales culture that recognizes that many different partner types can be influential in a given account, rather than just simply the transacting partner(s). We’re helping our partners build and maintain successful and profitable lines of business centered around SentinelOne and we’re appointing proven leaders with experience in growth at scale to guide our team to its full potential.