When it comes to enabling the transition to an agentic SOC and securing AI usage itself, SentinelOne has ‘tremendous momentum’ in the channel, solution provider executives tell CRN.
SentinelOne is driving massive growth opportunities for the channel with a series of smart moves on AI—helping partners to both protect GenAI usage and begin enabling the shift to a truly agentic Security Operations Center (SOC), according to solution provider executives.
The executives spoke with CRN in connection with SentinelOne’s OneCon 2025 conference last week, which saw the company debut an array of products across AI security as well as autonomous security operations. Without a doubt, SentinelOne is aiming to lead the way on the “agentic SOC” and, over time, is expecting to be able to provide a stunning level of autonomy in security operations, SentinelOne co-founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten said during an interview.
[Related: SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten’s 5 Boldest Statements At OneCon 2025]
Speaking with CRN, solution provider partners applauded Weingarten’s vision as well as the recent steps to acquire and rapidly integrate differentiated capabilities in AI and agentic.
SentinelOne debuted a portfolio of new AI security offerings in connection with its acquisition of Prompt Security, while also unveiling the integration of technology from recently acquired Observo AI, which can optimize data pipelines for autonomous threat detection and response.
The moves help with the currently available offerings in security operations, such as AI SIEM (security information and event management), while also helping to set the stage for a bigger shift into an agentic SOC going forward, according to solution providers.
“I feel like SentinelOne is really leading that charge, specifically around AI SIEM and acquiring Observo to be able to create data pipelines on the front end,” said Jared Crowley, senior director of partner software and security sales at Somerset, N.J.-based SHI International, No. 12 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025.
“That’s a really great strategy because it doesn’t have to be an immediate displacement,” Crowley said. “SentinelOne can get in the door with Observo and provide value to their customer base—even if they’re still on [a different SIEM platform]—and lower those costs. And now our foot’s in the door, and we can go and tell the AI SIEM story more effectively.”
‘Tremendous Momentum’
There’s no question that customers are looking for assistance in the short term in dealing with the overwhelming number of alerts generated by existing tools in their security operations, according to Scott Goree, senior vice president for partners, alliances and ecosystems at Denver-based Optiv, No. 28 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025.
“You just can’t reach them all without AI,” Goree said.
As a result, SOC modernization is among the top growth areas right now for Optiv, which is seeing “tremendous momentum” with SentinelOne in the segment, he said.
Looking ahead, the opportunity is clearly there to “have that agentic SOC conversation” with customers through the partnership with SentinelOne, Goree said.
For Assurance IT, a Montreal-based solution provider that focuses on SentinelOne for endpoint security, the expansion into areas such as AI SIEM will increasingly make sense for the company’s midmarket customers, according to co-founder Luigi Tiano.
Among other factors, SIEM is becoming more of a requirement from a compliance perspective for midmarket organizations, said Tiano, who is also vice president of sales and marketing at Assurance IT.
And there’s no question that when it comes to the aim of moving to a deeper level of autonomy in cybersecurity, SentinelOne is heading in “the right direction,” he said.
“The vision is great,” Tiano said. “Everybody wants that.”
Enabling The Agentic SOC
In an interview with CRN, Weingarten said that SentinelOne’s track record for autonomous endpoint security shows that the company is well-positioned to do the same thing in a broader way for security operations.
“We kind of coined the term ‘autonomous security’ way back when, before ChatGPT, because we actually embedded machine-learning models that worked autonomously for endpoint protection,” he said.
In other words, on the endpoint, SentinelOne has for years offered a “fully autonomous agent that works with no human supervision whatsoever,” Weingarten said.
The goal now is “to show is exactly the same thing, but for anything you connect to the platform,” he said. “So ideally, next time I’m on the OneCon stage I’ll show how I myself—one human—can click and secure an enterprise deployment of 100,000 employees, end to end, in three minutes on stage. And I think it’s fully doable.”
To begin laying the groundwork for the autonomous SOC, “the first step is to start getting data in”—which is an area that SentinelOne is seeking to enable its partners through technologies such as Observo, Weingarten said.
“Let’s start figuring out, how do we move data from which systems? And how do we optimize, filter and enrich all these data sources? That is [the capability of] Observo AI,” he said. “Data pipelines are that first building block for the autonomous SOC.”
The opportunity around securing AI itself, meanwhile, continues to be enormous for solution and service providers, Weingarten noted.
“The pull from the customers is amazing. It’s nothing that I’ve seen before,” he said. “I think the biggest immediate opportunity for partners is to come in and help customers adopt AI securely.”
Doubling Down On Partners
Crucially, SentinelOne is also making the right investments on the partner program side to fully unlock the huge growth opportunities in AI security and agentic SOC, solution provider executives said.
Recent adjustments to the rebate program and efforts to properly align compensation on managed services are two examples where SentinelOne’s parter commitment has really come through, according to SHI’s Crowley.
“They take the feedback from their partner ecosystem and they really do implement meaningful change, which I think speaks to the value that they see coming from the channel,” he said. “They made the milestones much more attainable and in line with their own growth estimates. And they also are paying quarterly, so that makes it much more predictable, and we’re able to use that money and invest it back into the business a lot faster.”
Ultimately, across both the AI-focused platform expansion and partner program improvements, “it feels like SentinelOne really values the partner community and sees us as a force multiplier as they try and expand and pick up more market share,” Crowley said.
