SentinelOne CEO: Risks Of Single-Vendor Concentration Are ‘Abundantly Clear’

After the massive CrowdStrike-caused Windows outage last month, SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten says the incident revealed that cybersecurity ‘is not a winner-takes-all market.’

SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten said Tuesday that the massive Microsoft Windows outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update last month signals the dangers of consolidating too heavily on certain technology vendors.

“The continuation of high-profile breaches and the recent global outage once again reinforced that cybersecurity is not a winner-takes-all market,” Weingarten said during the company’s quarterly call with analysts. “The systemic risks of single-vendor concentration are abundantly clear.”

[Related: SentinelOne CEO: Cybersecurity Shouldn’t Require Constant Updates]

The July 19 outage caused by CrowdStrike—a top competitor with SentinelOne—led to widely felt disruptions to air travel, health care and other industries for several days, and resulted in billions of dollars in estimated losses.

Weingarten mentioned the incident several times during the call Tuesday, at points echoing previous comments aired during an interview with CRN in the wake of the incident.

Going beyond his previous comments, however, the SentinelOne CEO placed a major emphasis Tuesday on the role of vendor consolidation in the incident, which hobbled 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide.

“The scale and disruption caused by this incident is a stark reminder of the risks posed by vendor concentration,” Weingarten said. “As I said last quarter, putting all eggs in the same basket is not advisable in security.”

The comments from Weingarten came as the company disclosed results for its second fiscal quarter, ended July 31, which came in just above analyst estimates. Revenue for the quarter grew 33 percent from the same period a year earlier, reaching $198.9 million.

The vendor’s annual recurring revenue, meanwhile, has risen 32 percent year-over-year to $806 million, SentinelOne said.

High points of the quarter for the quarter included strong growth in “emerging” segments such as cloud security and GenAI-powered security operations, which “continued to outpace the overall company growth rate in Q2,” Weingarten said.

In particular, the company’s GenAI-security operations offering, Purple AI, has “surpassed all our expectations” in the several months it has been available with “double-digit attach rates” across eligible endpoint security deployments during the company’s fiscal second quarter, he said.

SentinelOne’s stock price was up 1.8 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday to $25.19 a share.