SentinelOne forsees massive MSSP opportunities in APAC

“MSSPs have really been part of our business, especially in that lower end of the market,” said Kris Day, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan at SentinelOne.

In the Asia Pacific region, SentinelOne continues to record strong growth with its partner ecosystem playing a crucial role in the region. The security vendor concluded its APJ PartnerOne Summit in Khao Lak, Thailand with partners coming together to celebrate the success in the region.

According to Kris Day, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan at SentinelOne,everything that SentinelOne does is 100% indirect, making partners an incredibly important part of the business in the region. This includes distributors and even the partners beneath distribution, which SentinelOne works with closely.

“We work very closely with them. We don't envisage a world where we'd have a different strategy. And so we think very deeply about partners as part of our ecosystem,” he said.

Day explained there are several ways in which they work with partners in the region. First, they stop partners from being log aggregators. This means, SentinelOne don’t want partners just selling more storage as its not helping partners build value and establish good long-term value-based relationships with their customers.

“It's just selling them more storage and causing them a cost problem. What we help them do is move towards being a security orchestrator and selling intelligence as a service instead of just kind of aggregating logs. Put simply, we make partners help customers get more value. We can help customers orchestrate their entire security landscape rather than just dealing with the problem that the inefficiencies the security landscape is creating,” he explained.

The MSSP opportunity

While SentinelOne works with incident response partners, distributors and cloud partners, Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) are also an important aspect of SentinelOne’s ecosystem.

“MSSPs have really been part of our business, especially in that lower end of the market. For example, PurpleAI plays a huge role for them because what we're enabling them to do is create service revenues. The one-to-many concept for an MSSP is incredibly important. It's not just like every time they get a new customer, they now need to invest more in their SOC capabilities and have more resource. There's a simple math to it, but it really reduces their margins,” he said.

SentinelOne Purple AI is an advanced AI security analyst designed to transform complex, fragmented cybersecurity data into actionable insights through natural language. It acts as a force multiplier for Security Operations Centers (SOCs) by automating threat hunting, investigations, and responses,

“We enable them with PurpleAI as a force multiplier. The more customers they get, they can manage within the same platform that they get from SentinelOne. And PurpleAI is a really critical component to helping them achieve that because, we're enabling people to do the job of many operators with the natural language capabilities of PurpleAI, but we're even helping them automate a lot of tasks as well. You can use PurpleAI to do auto-triage on them,” he said.

Day also pointed out that SentinelOne is moving much more in the direction with hyper-automation of having it actually fulfill the complete journey of dealing with security threats as well.

For Day, MSSPs tend to be more self-sufficient as they're dealing primarily with, not exclusively, with the SME type of market who really want to make use of that one-to-many type of advantage in a platform.

“They want to buy into somebody else's platform as opposed to buying a platform for themselves. It makes perfect sense. The economics stack up in that space. So there's a degree of self-sufficiency, which means that we work with them, but actually more what we do is enable them to have successful businesses. And then in the high end of mid-market, lower end of enterprise, we're working much more closely with the more traditional SI and service, maybe MDR type services and partners that are providing different services and resale fulfillment as well in that space,” he added.

With a complex ecosystem of partners, Day added that every partner is important to them in different ways.

Growth in APAC

Looking at growth in the region, Day explained that each territory in Asia Pacific has very specific dynamics for SentinelOne. For example, Japan has a huge growth opportunity for the vendor.

“Even if we think about the legacy installed base in Japan is very significant, and we are in a different world where the types of attacks are dynamic and AI-generated, and it is difficult for traditional signature-based architectures to handle that type of threat. But there is still a very sovereign need in Japan, and the ACD laws mandate this in certain verticals as well. So I see that we have a fairly unique value proposition to address that need in Japan.

Another market is Korea, which Day highlighted has contributed significantly to SentinelOne’s growth over FY26. He said the Korean market has been a really important part of the journey thus far and will continue to be a really important part of the journey moving forward.

“I would say that a lot of that growth has been in some of the legacy replacement category. Some of it's sovereign, but not all of it. Some of it in sort of legacy endpoint replacement, and other parts of it in more extensive services around EDR,” he said.

Day also mentioned that PurpleAI has seen massive growth across the region.

“We've seen a lot of SaaS-based deals as well, and that talks much more on the AI side of the story. What we do here is combining in a single agent, the powers of not only endpoint protection, but identity, cloud protection all with a single agent coming into a single AI SIEM platform, which is a very powerful story for all of our markets as well.”

Day pointed out that most markets haven't moved 100% in the direction of SaaS or 100% in the direction of cloud. None of them have stayed also in 100% kind of self-hosted either.

“So the reality is that we are still today, after many years of talking about it, in a hybrid world. And I think the ability that we have to operate in a hybrid world has been a really powerful differentiator for us in all of our markets,” he explained.

For Day, all of the markets have been growing at an impressive rate through the last fiscal year, and he expects SentinelOne to continue that trajectory through this year as well.