SentinelOne ended its partnership with Wiz on Tuesday, only to revisit the decision the same week. Wiz was not involved in any decision but learned of the cessation of the collaboration in an email.
While announcing the quarterly results, Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne, spoke briefly about the collaboration with Wiz: “Wiz is a nice small start-up, we enjoy working with them.”
Weingarten shut down partnership
But the cyber security company did not give much sign of that two days earlier. SentinelOne then decided to unilaterally terminate its cooperation with Wiz. The two companies announced a partnership in March this year that would bring enhanced cloud security to customers. Specifically, the Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) would be combined with the Wiz Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP).
The discontinuation of the partnership was announced via e-mail addressed to sales representatives of SentinelOne and Wiz. It stated the decision made by SentinelOne’s management, which Weingarten is responsible for. Official communication about the decision has been limited. Multiple news media, including Reuters, announced Wednesday that the partnership was scrapped due to a “lack of performance.”
Partnership partly terminated
Weingarten said during the announcement of the quarterly results that only a part of the collaboration was being infected: “But again, in terms of the distribution contract, we didn’t see any contribution to that. We didn’t feel that this is something that is fulfilled on their side, so we decided to end that.” With a distribution contract, parties buy services or products from each other and then sell them as part of their own offerings.
A company spokesperson shared the following with our editors yesterday, “We have terminated our reciprocal resale agreement with Wiz due to lack of performance. This is just one of many partner relationships and does not complement our ongoing cloud go-to-market strategy.” We further asked why exactly the decision was made unilaterally and without further communication, but received no response to that (yet).
Interest in acquisition
Either way, the timing of the news remains striking. The American cyber security company SentinelOne has recently been looking at options for a possible sale. The company presented disappointing revenue figures for the past two years. In the last quarter, it did manage to expand its customer base by more than 11,000 customers and appeared to attract renewed interest in the party’s Singularity Platform. However, the company’s shares fell eight percent during the quarter.
However, the company has been around for a decade and is currently still estimated to have a market value of $5 billion. Weingarten therefore prefers to see the company end up in the hands of a tech giant such as Microsoft or IBM through an acquisition, where there are no worries about finances.
Wiz also reacted to the news last weekend, expressing interest in acquiring SentinelOne. That possibly prompted the unilateral cancellation of the partnership. Wiz was only founded in 2020 and is still a start-up with a size of 1,000 employees. SentinelOne, as a larger and older company, may have perceived this interest as derogatory. Moreover, the cloud security provider’s image has been damaged recently. This stems from a serious accusation by competitor Orca Security, which claims that Wiz copied their entire corporate infrastructure.
Also read: Orca Security: ‘Wiz copied our corporate infrastructure flawlessly’
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