SentinelOne, Pax8 Expand Partnership: 4 Things To Know

The two-year deal will see more of SentinelOne’s tools coming to the Pax8 marketplace, including in identity and cloud security, the vendor tells CRN.

SentinelOne has expanded its partnership with cloud-focused distributor Pax8 in a major deal that will create significant opportunities for MSPs, the cybersecurity vendor exclusively told CRN.

The two-year agreement will see more of SentinelOne’s tools coming to the Pax8 marketplace — beyond its core endpoint security offering — and will also see the distributor putting more of its attention behind bringing SentinelOne products to its large base of MSPs, according to SentinelOne’s Chris Catanzaro.

Greenwood Village, Co.-based Pax8 serves more than 29,000 partners, and has offered products from Mountain View, Calif.-based SentinelOne since 2019.

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Catanzaro, who is global vice president of MSSP and channel sales at SentinelOne, characterized the new Pax8 agreement as a “giant deal” that will prove to be a major win for MSPs. He praised Pax8’s commitment to finding new ways to bring new security technologies to smaller service providers and their SMB customers — a notoriously underserved segment of the market when it comes to cybersecurity.

With the massive number of small businesses out there that Pax8 is helping to serve, “the potential seems to be limitless with them,” Catanzaro said.

In a statement, Pax8 Founder and CEO John Street described SentinelOne as “one of our largest and fastest-growing partners,” and said he expects the new deal with the vendor to ultimately create “greater value” for channel partners and SMBs.

What follows are four things to know about SentinelOne and Pax8’s newly expanded partnership.

Expanded Commitment

The new deal with Pax8 means the distributor is committing to make a “harder push” to bring SentinelOne to MSPs and their SMB customers, Catanzaro told CRN.

That will include efforts by Pax8 to “systematically” assess its partners and customers to see where there might be an opportunity to sell more SentinelOne, he said. For instance, if an MSP has procured 20,000 seats of Microsoft 365 and just 2,000 seats of SentinelOne, that would suggest a chance to extend the security vendor further within that MSP — and Pax8 will now be making a concerted effort to identify those mismatches, according to Catanzaro.

SentinelOne has also undertaken a trial with Pax8 around bundling its security tools with other products available from the distributor, and will now be taking that concept more broadly within its MSP base as part of the new agreement, he said.

The overall idea is that Pax8 will now be more regularly telling MSPs, “‘we know you bought this [product] — and based on the reasons why you already own this, we know that you really need SentinelOne,’” Catanzaro said.

New Tools Arriving

Another key element of the expanded partnership will be the addition of more SentinelOne tools from its Singularity platform to the Pax8 marketplace, joining the vendor’s endpoint security offering, the companies said.

One new product that will soon be added is SentinelOne’s vulnerability management tool, Ranger Insights, while another forthcoming tool will be SentinelOne’s identity security product, according to Catanzaro.

SentinelOne also plans to soon make its mobile security offering, Singularity Mobile, available to MSPs via Pax8, he said.

Focus On Cloud Security

SentinelOne already offers cloud workload protection through Pax8, but the vendor is aiming to make a bigger effort around cloud security with the distributor going forward, Catanzaro said.

In particular, SentinelOne wants to be able to offer cloud security assessment capabilities in order to show SMBs why they need to invest in securing their cloud environments, he said. SentinelOne is planning to soon enter this space with an offering in CSPM (cloud security posture management), executives have said.

“We offer our cloud workload protection, and it is reasonably adopted,” Catanzaro said. “But when we are able to illustrate where the real gaps are in [SMBs’] security posture, then we’ll be able to blow it out with them. So there’s a lot of optimism around that.”

Partner Opportunities

Catanzaro pointed to a number of ways that the expanded SentinelOne-Pax8 partnership will create larger business opportunities for MSPs.

For instance, many of the SentinelOne security tools that are being newly added to the Pax8 marketplace bring greater revenue potential than endpoint security, he noted.

“If I look out a couple of years, endpoint is only going to be 18 to 20 percent of the revenue we’re generating with Pax8,” Catanzaro said. “The other solutions are going to far out outweigh the dollar value.”

Adding more products that are available on SentinelOne’s Singularity platform also makes the vendor more appealing as an endpoint security provider — and as a security vendor overall — given the huge demand for tool consolidation among partners and customers, he said.

“As we develop the platform more, it actually helps [attract] people who want to just buy the endpoint — because they know that there’s a path to add more solutions to secure their environment,” Catanzaro said.