Cybersecurity guru Bob Keblusek explains how AI is driving security sales for Sentinel Technologies, a top-notch solution provider that partners with VMware and AWS.
Sentinel Technologies is seeing a spike in security sales as customers’ concerns around agentic AI cyber threats grow at a breakneck pace, with the solution provider bullish about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) innovation as well as selling on the AWS Marketplace.
“The more capabilities we can get into VCF, especially with AI and localization of AI—that’s going to make it even more appealing to our customers,” said Bob Keblusek, a longtime cybersecurity leader and CTO of Downers Grove, Ill.-based Sentinel Technologies.
“We have a lot of customers leaning in toward localizing AI. I see it mostly for cost control, but also for compliance needs. So that they know where the data is being handled, how it’s being handled, and they can use localization of models as well for a lot of the jobs that AI is doing today,” Keblusek said. “That’s starting to come up in far more conversations in the midmarket, upper midmarket especially. We’re seeing it accelerate.”
[Related: VMware Adds Google, Nvidia AI Models To VCF; Boosts Tanzu Security To Drive AI Adoption]
In an interview with CRN, Keblusek talks about selling through the AWS Marketplace, new VMware security innovation and how Sentinel’s cybersecurity sales are accelerating as AI-powered attacks are rapidly increasing in speed.
Is agentic AI driving security sales for Sentinel? Also, coming out of VMware Explore, talk about how some of that innovation will help you drive AI adoption for customers.
So with agentic AI it’s how do you govern that, control that and orchestrate that. Those are the very large topics with our customers who are adopting agentic, but also for us as an MSP and MSSP—it is a large conversation that many vendors are taking a swing at [with] different approaches to handling it.
So seeing VMware go after this market makes a ton of sense, especially with their Tanzu platform.
If we’re able to add agentic security so that our customers can adopt agentic AI and feel comfortable about it, run it in their own data centers or in a VMware secure enclave or cloud—that is all very welcoming.
Security is the top concern when I’m talking to customers about AI adoption.
It isn’t whether they want to adopt AI, it’s how do they do it safely, securely and with policy-based enforcement.
So a lot of companies came out with policies. They’re coming out with agentic policies. Now we need to really put the controls in place to enforce those policies.
It starts with monitoring. It starts with being able to build that secure, trustworthy infrastructure, and then we’ll see AI adopted at even higher rates than we see today.
What is one of the hottest market trends Sentinel is seeing regarding sales and client momentum?
AI is in every single conversation and it’s driving a tremendous amount of security conversations.
There’s excitement around some of the new capabilities to secure AI—from an access perspective, from a data perspective, from an application perspective, putting in guardrails, using AI to defend themselves in security products—it’s pretty amazing what you can see today with AI analysts and AI threat hunting.
The ‘bad guys’ are using it too. So AI has accelerated the rate of attacks.
It’s accelerated everything in the market, but security has been especially impacted by needing to secure AI but also securing yourself from the AI speed of attacks.
We’re having to ward off threat actors trying to live off the land.
I think the only thing we can do is adopt AI to protect ourselves from the AI being used to attack us. That’s a huge trend, the speed of everything that’s occurring in cybersecurity. But Sentinel is on top of it and helping our customers remain on top of it as well.
Does Sentinel use any cloud marketplace to sell to customers?
We have quite a bit on the AWS Marketplace. We leaned in a few years back. We’ve been present there for a long time.
Certainly, we obviously are looking at cost models whenever we’re considering a marketplace and transaction, as well as the benefit to both the customer and us. We’ve always had our traditional approach and method to being able to sell product, where it’s either from a vendor direct or through a distributor, we have a very clear cost model going to the customer.
But where customers have spending agreements and other contracts with somebody like AWS, it makes sense. It’s very convenient for them.
They have preapproved purchasing. They have some preapproved budget that can be consumed, so we’re always happy to help our customers go in that direction.
But when we have to share margin or it costs us more, at some point in time somebody has to pay for that type of transaction. So it needs to be a fair price across the board, a win-win-win for everybody.
When AWS lowers our costs for transactions, it certainly helps make that far more appealing of a channel to go through.
What are your customers saying today regarding VMware prices? Is VMware pricing still an issue with your clients in 2026?
After the initial acquisition from Broadcom, you had some customers looking to move, some looking to stay, some looking at their options. We were helping them through those decisions.
But by and large, mostly everybody we worked with we’ve been able to negotiate a fair VMware contract for them to remain on the product that they love.
We enjoy supporting those customers. So it has been settling down some.
We’re seeing some public cloud adoption, but some of it’s aligned with their AI strategies.
The new VMware innovation will make it more attractive for customers to have those conversations around AI, to localize their AI platforms—which may not drive them to the public cloud.
Public cloud may not be the easiest path [for AI adoption]. There’s sometimes a more secure, easier path with VMware on-prem or in a VMware cloud running some of their new capabilities.
