Dive Brief:
- ConnectWise added extended detection and response and other advanced features to its managed security service offering through a partnership expansion with cybersecurity vendor SentinelOne, the companies announced Tuesday.
- ConnectWise already used SentinelOne for its managed detection and response platform and will now incorporate SentinelOne’s full technology suite, including application security, AI prompt security and XDR.
- “Our work with ConnectWise reflects a shared commitment to helping MSPs use advanced security technology effectively and at scale,” SentinelOne President and CRO Michael Cremen said in the announcement. “We look forward to continuing that work in the coming quarters in ways that help our mutual partners and their customers confidently and securely embrace their AI advantage.”
Dive Insight:
ConnectWise is doubling down on managed security services through the expanded SentinelOne partnership. The IT services software company provides an outsourced security operations center to MSPs, but its SOC uses underlying technology from SentinelOne, Microsoft, Proofpoint, Bitdefender and other vendors.
Rather than acquiring or building cybersecurity solutions in-house, the firm has relied on OEMs for advanced tools while building out its core MSP capabilities.
“Every one of these things we're selling is in the Gartner Magic Quadrant,” ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo told Channel Dive in an interview at GTIA’s ChannelCon event Tuesday. “When we look at the industry and some of our competitors, they don't even show up. They don't even get evaluated, because they're not of the size or the scale.”
Rivelo said ConnectWise’s integrations with other vendors will continue to ensure choice for partners, but the partnership with SentinelOne is tighter, according to Rivelo.
“It will simplify the MSP portfolio because they won't have to integrate a lot of technologies,” he said. “A lot of those technologies have already been integrated into the Singularity platform by SentinelOne.”
As insurance requirements and market competition push MSPs to add managed security to core IT services, many have leaned into outsourcing. They have the option to go straight to an MDR provider such as Sophos or OpenText, but Rivelo said ConnectWise’s status as a RMM and PSA provider makes its SOC more effective.
“We know how many tickets are directly opened up on your machine,” Rivelo said. “We know what software you have installed. We have a lot more context. Part of that context will also be fed to SentinelOne to do more higher intelligence.”
The partnership allows SentinelOne to cover SMBs while keeping its direct sales teams and resellers focused on the 2,000 largest organizations in the world.
“That's where their time is best spent,” he said. “Then they open up through channel distribution, MSPs and the rest of the market. They're looking for partners like us who want to enable that for them.”
The managed security offering has evolved to integrate automation since Rivelo joined the company in 2024. The executive said AI agents perform most of the SOC’s level one work and a large part of level two.
Said Rivelo: “When we were entering [last year], the request was to add almost 400 people to our SOC, and I'm like, ‘First of all, we don't even have the space for 400 people. Second of all, even if I tried to hire one a day, I'll never hire that many people, and you're going to get burnout in the SOC.’”
AI agents are a critical component of the 15-minute service level agreement ConnectWise introduced for its managed EDR in April. SOC teams spend much of their time sorting through noise in their environment to understand where true threats lie. The agentic layer functions as a filter for the noise while humans address verified threats.
“If we're managing your MDR for every incident on that endpoint on that console, within 15 minutes, we will identify it, triage it, and fix it, whether it's a problem or not,” Rivelo said. “Most of the industry says we'll give you a 15-minute objective to get to it, not a fix.”
