SentinelOne is a global cybersecurity provider with an expanding presence in South Korea. I talked with Joe McPhillips, APJ Senior Director for Channel Business at SentinelOne, during his recent trip to South Korea.
Can you tell us about SentinelOne and the company’s go-to-market strategy in South Korea?
Our company’s go-to-market from a channel perspective is a two-tiered distribution into the reseller channel, who then sell our products to their end-user customers. We have a direct sales force that engages the end customer, but we never transact directly with them.
SentinelOne uses a 100% channel model in Asia Pacific Japan (APJ), and the strategy is applied here in South Korea as well. We have three distributors – Samsung, SDS, and Escare. They each work with different parts of the market and have different approaches toward developing the Korean market on our behalf.
You joined SentinelOne in 2021. What has been your key focus?
Education has been our key focus with our APJ channel partners. Knowledge is power, and we need more knowledge within our partner community to help deliver SentinelOne’s message, so Education, Education, and Education have been a key component and the focus of our strategy.
When our partners have knowledge of the technology, they can listen to their customers discuss challenges they are facing and then offer technological solutions to resolve those issues.
I understand you recently held a partner summit in Phuket for APJ regional partners. Is that part of your focus on education?
The inaugural summit for APJ attracted about 150 people, including 120 partners, ten of whom came from South Korea. It was a highly successful, fully-fledged partner conference where we engaged from a sales, technical, and educational capacity. We had a number of workshops led by SEs who shared real-world knowledge of how to sell.
Based on the feedback we’ve received, we achieved our goals of educating partners, thanking them for their efforts over the past year, and celebrating the achievements of SentinelOne.
What are the key strategies you are using to help your South Korean partners grow?
We have a very interesting market in terms of our partner ecosystem. We work with three types of partners – resellers, system integrators (SI), and managed services partners (MSSP). MSSPs, for example, have very different commercial and customer engagement models.
Let’s stick with MSSPs for a moment. We have been very successful at delivering commercial offerings that suit MSSPs, but in addition, we have matched that with technical capabilities to ensure that they can run multi-tenant instances that enable them to manage multiple layers for their customer base.
When I think about our strategy from a go-to-market perspective, our distribution team provides holistic support to all our resellers, SIs, and MSSPs.
What are some of the traits you see in the South Korean market?
From a channel perspective, the market is very interesting. It’s similar to Japan in the sense that end customers put a lot of faith and trust in channel partners. We see that type of relationship in other regions as well, but it is very pronounced in Korea. There is clearly a next-level type of relationship between our Korean partners and their end users.
That being the case, it’s really important to SentinelOne that we provide the best opportunity in terms of both technology and capability, and that we are able to drive the customer’s security posture higher while reducing their TCO. Fortunately, we have that ability with our Singularity XDR platform, so our channel partners are able to deliver the highest quality security solution to their end-user community.
