The idea that new technologies will make solution providers irrelevant ‘has been talked about for a long, long time’—but ‘the data would tell you a very different story,’ Lynch tells CRN.
Even with all the massive potential for how AI could reshape the worlds of business and technology, there’s little reason to believe it will lead to a wholesale replacement of the value provided by the channel, according to Optiv CEO Kevin Lynch.
In an interview with CRN, Lynch said that rather than making solution providers unnecessary, AI will do the “opposite”—by making the advisory and delivery services provided by the channel even more critical than ever.
Fundamentally, the idea that new technologies will make solution providers irrelevant “has been talked about for a long, long time,” he said. “The data would tell you a very different story.”
Lynch made the comments as Denver-based cybersecurity powerhouse Optiv, No. 28 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500, is already seeing “massive business” from its work in helping to enable secure adoption of AI and agentic technologies.
[RELATED: How Optiv Defined The Security Channel—And Is Transforming Partnership For The AI Era]
To help lay the groundwork for the fast-paced AI growth opportunities ahead, Optiv recently unveiled its revamped partner program, Optiv One, which Lynch said will “set the stage” for accelerated collaboration with the solution provider’s key vendor partners.
Speaking with CRN, Lynch also discussed how enterprise security teams are overwhelmed by tool sprawl and complexity, driving greater demand for the types of expertise that Optiv provides.
What follows is more of CRN’s interview with Lynch.
What are the key things to know about your new Optiv One partner program?
I think this is one of the more important things we’ve done over the years. We constantly think there are new challenges we have to surmount to ultimately help our clients. We’re that critical last mile to them. We’re that partner and solution provider of choice. So if we’re not pushing the envelope of innovation in some respect, then are they getting what they really need?
When I think about the partner program, to me, it’s one of [those] levers where you are pulling on multiple things to improve an outcome. If we think about the external world and what that looks like today, clients are increasingly trying to get to simplification. Some people get to simplification thinking solely in terms of reducing their vendor count. Some people think about it in terms of information and telemetry, and the use of systems more in concert and connected telemetry. Some people think about it in terms of both. Some people think about it in terms of creating the space for what’s new, like AI. That client lens comes into play.
Then if you take an ecosystem view of the world, and look at what’s happening in the space, yes, there still are between 3,500 and 4,000 cybersecurity companies in the world providing capability and technology. But at the same time, the number of large-scale, billion-dollar or greater TAM [total addressable market] providers has also grown. That means the industry is getting to some degree of consolidation. It’s not consolidated, like ERP, where we have three vendors in the world. But it is definitely starting that path that’s been talked about for a long time. So the fundamental ecosystem, or option set, is changing rapidly, daily. And this notion of platforms, or platformization, is actually coming to play—where clients don’t think about it as an ethereal choice any longer. They think about it as a real option. It’s not quite one plug-and-play, simple license move. But it’s moving in that direction, and real options are being created.
Where does Optiv really sit in the middle of all this change?
If you think about that as a landscape—between clients and their preference, and the ecosystem of options and technology capabilities and how one consumes that—we live in that intersection. That’s our bread and butter. If we’re going to do our best in that, the partner program becomes effectively the fabric upon which we play that game. And so when we look at that, having a large set of partners is seemingly important—but having those that we work closest with is more important. Optiv One, for us, has really been about getting to the point where we are prioritizing those partners in a way that’s commensurate with our clients’ expectations. We’re getting to rules of engagement in how we work together, in a very demonstrable but different way than [it was] historically. Our industry has been focused on trust by definition. Our relationships have had a high degree of trust, and they still do. But now what we’re doing is we’re making hardline commitments to our partners in terms of how we will both operate, what we will do based on certain scenarios, how we will invest in creating more demand, opportunity, visibility, market awareness. [It’s about] truly working as an ecosystem, committed to one another through rules and engagements and expectations and protocols. You could say it’s the purest manifestation of a partnership.
What does that look like for Optiv in terms of how you’re going to work with vendors moving forward?
We’re going to double down with everything we do. We’re going to hardline commit to one another. We’re going to be public about that. We’re going to do that with our largest, most vibrant partners, No. 1. No. 2, we’re going to be able to discern those that we do work [with] in the market around services very clearly, and those that we don’t. No. 3, it’s going to allow us to think about the spaces in the market that need coverage—where we’re going to look for what’s next and what’s new, and not only do the things that are volumetrically driven, but that are intellectually interesting in light of the threats our clients are facing. So it does force us to be out looking at that growing edge of the ecosystem as well. And then No. 4, we’re going to look at the existing balance of our partners. And it’s not to say that they’re not important by any means. But it’s to be set up to be successful in their lens and ours. If there’s a client that needs something from them, that we’re in a position to transact with them and bring them to market.
It’s really [about] resource allocation. I think one of my four central jobs is capital or resource allocation. And it’s hard for a lot of organizations to do that well because there always is more demand than there is supply in any organization of any scale, and priorities have to be the watch word. And for us, this is really, at its core, about our priorities, from our clients, from our partners, manifesting the partner program—and therefore vectoring our resources, our capital, etc., both human and economic, in a very focused way. If we do that right, then our clients are ultimately the great beneficiary of this.
How do you navigate the fact that the vendor landscape has grown to such a large size, in particular?
[At Optiv sales kickoff] we had the CROs of three of our partners on stage. And it was fascinating. These are three companies that are not from a market footprint independent of one another. They have edges of what they do that overlap with one another. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that. Last year, we had several CEOs with us. [CrowdStrike CEO] George Kurtz and I spent an hour on stage. So we just thought we would continue with it. And why not put three of them together? And one of them said it better than I think we could say it—which was, ‘We’re clear-eyed about this. We compete with one another, and we [collaborate] with one another.’ In other words, there’s places where it’s really important we work in unison to solve a client’s issues. And there’s other places where we’re competitors. It was amazing—not just the tone, but the content from that. It was not a posturing of three people trying to tell our field organization that they’re better than the person next to them. It was a really amazing, almost microscopic look at the ecosystem—to say, ‘We understand what we do. The client is superlative in this. We’ve got to solve the client’s issues. Yes, we’re a for-profit business. Yes, we want to grow and win share, etc. But we can’t do that at the cost of the client. So there’s places we have to connect.’
When I look at what’s happening in the industry, you see that dynamic. We’ve seen it coming now for a few years. But it’s this notion of interoperability. That coopetition matters.
Cross-platform connectivity is a very strong trend that not a lot of people are talking about. But it’s actually mattering a great deal.
What’s the biggest challenge enterprise security teams are facing right now?
The average security professional at an enterprise client has to be expert in greater than five tools and coming up toward the double digits. Is that even remotely feasible? The answer is no. Can they be sufficient at it? Yes. Can they be expert at it? No. It creates the necessity for them to think about solution providers that are going to fill in that gap, a la Optiv, and managed service providers that can take over some of that for them, a la Optiv. [They’re looking at] tech consolidation—not from the purposes of necessarily having fewer vendors, but for telemetry integration, where they get better yield out of the tools. They’re having an actual conscious choice about, ‘What amount of spend do we have by control, by domain?’ So they can look at their full architecture [and] have that holistic view in light of the fact that the system probably changed over under two years in that organization by current benchmark. And yet, that technology expenditure and all the technical debt proceeded and follows. So they’ve got a serious complexity issue. That’s the No. 1 thing that they’re facing today—this notion of complexity of telemetry, connectivity, being able to actually manage threats, expertise in their team and/or through providers. And so the notion that our partners are starting to build that connectivity and/or acquire that connectivity in consolidation, this is the big trend that’s happening in our space.
How have customer expectations reshaped the way Optiv works with partners?
If you look at our relationships with these partners, many of them are long-standing, and then some of them are newer. And when I think about partnerships—having spent a lot of time in my career, in one professionally—I have a lens on this. I think great partnerships aren’t necessarily bound by great documents like contracts. But every once in a while, formalization of those commitments is a good, healthy thing—especially in a world that’s getting more complex. Many years back, when we had a client that comes to us and says, ‘I need an identity governance solution,’ we’d sit with them and have a conversation around just that topic, we would put our technical expertise to bear. Our technical expertise would be that great last mile for our [vendor] partners that didn’t have the scale to have that technical expertise everywhere. We’d think about the fit within their architecture and use case. We’d think about their array of options, and we’d come back to them with recommendations around what would fit and why. And then we’d start to work with them on best economic fit. And that was a good model for a long time. Today, that same transactional moment happens, but it’s really different because that client’s no longer coming for a point solution. The client’s actually coming and saying, ‘Look, I’ve got some big trends to deal with. Yes, I have an identity governance need that we need to talk about. But I’ve got a corporate imperative to reduce my cost of security per capita, No 1. No. 2, I’ve got to create some economic space because I’m months away from an AI implementation on the agentic side, and I don’t have the capacity to stay at pace with that—so I need to save some money that I can allocate somewhere else. No. 3, and probably most importantly, the complexity is overwhelming me, and so I really need us to be thinking about the use case for this identity governance—not only for its current situation, but where else can I get yield out of it for both cost and simplification?’ So the complexity of that client engagement is radically different. It’s no longer a point use. It’s a holistic view of how technology is being used in the enterprise, which is driving deeper engagement with certain [vendor] partners. It’s not us just picking the biggest, but it’s also driving a different conversation—where tech and services, and having the rules of engagement around how we do that and the commitment to one another, it puts us in a different place with them. We’re venturing in as a partner dedicated to doing the right thing. We might be bringing two or three [vendor] partners together in an overall solution. And rather than having disruption in that, we’ve agreed to standards and expectations. And so to me, it’s a lot broader than the go-to-market element. That’s a big, important part—where we’re committing to each other to be that last mile, effectively, and not face some move to do something direct or otherwise. By the way, on all those, we find that the client usually gets a better deal when they’re going with us than they do if they go direct. And that’s just invariably been true every time we look at it. But for us, it’s now about this commitment where we can actually invest. Think about the difference of being transactional versus purposely investing in that client relationship to deliver the better outcome. That, to me, is maybe the most powerful part of it.
There’s often been talk that technology, such as AI today, will displace the channel—but could it actually be the opposite?
Yes, I think it’s the opposite. It’s interesting though because that has been talked about for a long, long time. Somewhere today, in an enterprise client, there’s someone in the procurement department that thinks they’ve got a great idea and they’re going to save the company some money. And they think, ‘We’ll just go direct to the vendor and that’ll take the middleman out, and that’ll save a ton of money.’ The data would tell you a very different story.
For me, having seen clients buy technology direct and spend way more—or buy technology direct and not go through a good technical evaluation fit for the use case—[that leads to] enormous pains. And, by the way, [it can cause] massively larger expenditures to make it work. In our services side, we [will] try and make a technology package work that should never have been purchased. And it’s painful, so their total cost of enterprise use goes way, way up. Does that always mean life is always perfect with us? No, I’m not suggesting that. But we do play that really valuable role of being intimate with the client.
Our abilities today, and why we’ve invested so fervently in our Optiv Market System is, we can now look at that client and say, ‘I know what your tech stack looks like. I know how it all arrays. I know that you’re spending three times as much on this control and zero over here. I know the maturity model of your business and where you really have your exposures.’ I can bring all of that context and deep technical expertise—and even our shift internally, away from our distribution of our field engineers by account and now more to pods by expertise—allows us to bring that top-notch engineering expert in a domain to bear to that client right at that point of a big problem. So it’s all about transiting that use case to [provide] the best answer for them at the best price.
As much as our partners are amazing at what they do, this is what we do. And we’re amazing at it. So it really is why we’re valuable and create value in the in the ecosystem. And I think the partnership program under Optiv One is just a manifestation of what I just said. Our need and value for them is big. Obviously, without them, we’re not in business. And both of us are not in business if we’re not adding value to a client at a point where they have really unique needs.
How do you approach joint investments with vendor partners around big market themes like AI?
If we and our partners invest in a market space—[such as] a market campaign around a major issue like agentic AI and securing the organization—we’re going to build intellectual property around that. We’re going to build, obviously, an ability to educate our clients on that. We’re going to pick our [vendor] partners and how they plug into that campaign. We’re going to invest in it, and so will our partners. And we’ll be clear about what our partners’ stake of investment is in that campaign. So now today, we can actually answer that question that the marketing professional couldn’t do years back—which is, what’s the effective yield for my dollar of market or demand generation funds? What do I get out of it? And that level of commitment to our partners, I think, is again, instrumental to why people would come to us.
They’re flocking to us to sign up for this [partner program]—because we’re making hard commitments with expectations and returns and commitments on our side that we must meet or exceed. We’ll go create the demand. We’ll go create the market buzz. We’ll go create the connectivity—let alone our engagement with a unique client. And we’ll be able to show you your demonstrable ROI.
[Our key partners] love this. They’ve got stakeholders and investors, just like we do. And for them, it’s an easy play for them to say, ‘This is a sophisticated, dual-sided relationship, where both sides have tried to get to a common goal. And we’re being explicit about inputs and outcomes.’ That’s nirvana from a business leadership basis.
How would you sum up the significance of this initiative and what it says about the opportunities ahead for Optiv in 2026?
If I look at what we’ve done over the last handful of years, if we were in the shipbuilding business, one could [say] Optiv has been launching a lot of keels in our shipyard over the years, and you could say the same thing about us, obviously, in our current business, which is focused on our clients around cybersecurity, risk and resilience, we launched Optiv Market System. We’re in many generations downrange now, including a client aspect for their use, so that has become a full-blown ship and gone through modernization after modernization, including a new net one that rolls out this month both for our partners in terms of how they utilize the data from that, but [also] importantly [for] our field team. We’ve made other investments. And now, those investments in the business, those individual things are coming together in concert at a time where I think it really matters.
So we’re using and harvesting a lot of that capability we’ve built in a unified fashion now. [It’s] all from the lens of a client that we think has one inherent challenge to go solve. None of them are the same. They’re all unique. But they all have common challenges. And this notion of complexity, to me, is the top of the list. And complexity shows up different ways. We’ll solve it different ways. But our real goal has to be to create capacity for them. So they’re lowering their per cost per capita of security, but they’re creating capacity to deal with what’s next. Because the AI wave may roll up and down a little bit as it continues to grow, but it’s going in one direction. It’s probably limited more by power at the end of the day, as seen through data centers, than it is in terms of the desire to consume. It’s going to be a market that’s going to be strong and big. And servicing and securing agentic is going to be a massive business for us—it already is. But they have to create the capacity to do that. There’s no bandwidth in an enterprise to go find more capital to do that or to create more complexity. So that is really the game.
And I think we’ve set the stage with our partner program. We’ve set the stage with our [vendor] partners. We’ve set the stage with our data and our use of data and the sophistication of Optiv Market System. And we’ve even set the stage financially. The company has gone through a long process of re-evaluating our capital structure [leading to] the recapitalization of our debt. That really sets the company up in a great, healthy position to prosecute this growth agenda over the next several years ahead. And so, I feel like we have literally laid out the game for the year—thus our theme for Optiv Kick Off [was] ‘Run the Play.’ The game is set. The team is set. We’ve got, I think, the best team on the field. We’ve got the best relationships, as manifested through Optiv One and our partner system. And so we have pretty high ambitions for what the year will yield.
