SentinelOne Terminates Partnership with Cloud Security Startup Wiz

SentinelOne has abruptly ended its partnership with Wiz, a cloud security startup. This comes after Wiz reportedly was interested in acquiring SentinelOne.

Earlier this week, we reported Wiz is considering a potential bid for SentinelOne after the company started exploring strategic options. Before that, people familiar with the matter told Reuters SentinelOne was considering its options, including a sale.

SentinelOne sent us the following statement:

“We terminated our mutual resell agreement with Wiz due to lack of performance.  This is just one of many partner relationships and not additive to our ongoing cloud go-to-market strategy.”

When asked about the partnership termination, Wiz reiterated its original statement regarding 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. SentinelOne has a strong cybersecurity offering, and we have been following their growth journey for the past several years.”

Partnership Brought Together Two ‘Innovative,’ ‘Forward-Thinking’ Companies

In March, SentinelOne announced the exclusive and strategic partnership with Wiz. Through the strategic partnership, Wiz’s Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) and SentinelOne’s Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), could be offered to organizations of all sizes and equip customers with a cloud security solution to detect, prevent, investigate and respond to cloud security threats.

This partnership brought together two of the “most trusted, innovative and forward-thinking” companies in the cybersecurity industry, according to SentinelOne. The joint offerings provided customers with enhanced visibility and protection of their cloud workloads, streamlined procurement, and simplified deployment, enabling them to better secure their cloud infrastructure and workloads without hampering the speed or agility of their application development teams.

Omdia’s Fernando Montenegro

Earlier this week, Fernando Montenegro, senior principal analyst with Omdia, which shares a parent company with Channel Futures (Informa), told us this potential acquisition shows Wiz is looking to “expand their footprint both into having a strong agent-based offering (they were working on their own agent) as well as a broader play beyond the cloud providers themselves.”

“With many organizations being multicloud and being hybrid – meaning having significant on-premises footprint alongside cloud – this expands the potential reach for Wiz,” he said. “It certainly would put Wiz in a different light than other specialist cloud security vendors. The downside is the common issues with competition risk, with how well will both technical and cultural integration happen, and more.”