Wiz Product, Channel Strategy Led To $32B Google Acquisition Deal: Partner CEO

The cloud security vendor adopted the channel ‘early on’ and continually made smart investments into its platform, according to the CEO of major Wiz partner Evotek.

Wiz made early moves to embrace channel partners and continually made smart investments into its cloud and AI security platform — setting up the company to be a fast-growing disrupter that Google now plans to acquire for a record $32 billion, according to the CEO a major Wiz partner.

Cesar Enciso, founder and CEO of San Diego-based system integrator Evotek, said there’s no question that partners were a central part of what enabled Wiz to achieve its unheard-of growth — and ultimately, to reach a deal that would make the company the largest acquisition in both cybersecurity and Google history.

Founded in 2020, Wiz went from zero to $100 million in annual recurring revenue during its first 18 months in the market, before surging to $500 million in ARR last year. Reportedly, expectations are for the company to double to $1 billion in ARR for this year.

“Early on, they adopted the channel [at Wiz],” Enciso said in an interview with CRN. And crucially, “they had a solid platform from day one — and they kept on investing into their platform,” he said.

Wiz also brought a focus on cloud security from the get-go — whereas “five years ago, a lot of folks weren’t talking about cloud security,” Enciso said. “They were at the right time and the right place. And they have a beautiful product.”

Wiz specializes in offering agentless capabilities that rapidly improve visibility into cloud environments, enabling much faster fixes for misconfigurations and other security gaps in the cloud. And notably, the company is now extending its capabilities to the increasingly crucial AI security space.

Notably, “out of all of our customers that are on Wiz, we haven’t had any challenges,” Enciso told CRN. “You can’t say that about all of our products.”

Enciso noted that Evotek’s focus on emerging technologies — which constitute 75 percent of the company’s revenue — helped lead to a partnership with Wiz not long after the company entered the market. Evotek was “one of Wiz’s first partners in North America and [remains] one of their largest partners in North America,” he said.

In an interview with CRN last year, Wiz Co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport said the startup understood that in cybersecurity, in particular, channel partners are “super important in the success of a company.”

“We’ve always [seen that] this has huge potential for us to tap into,” he said at the time.

Assuming that Google’s all-cash acquisition of Wiz closes and the company becomes part of Google Cloud, partners will remain “integral” to the Wiz strategy, Rappaport wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Organizations “now have an even more compelling reason to embrace our cloud security platform; the timing has never been better to partner with Wiz,” he wrote.