Advantage Named SentinelOne APJ Partner Of The Year, Steve Smith Named Top Sales Person Of The Year

For the second year running, Advantage New Zealand has featured prominently in security vendor SentinelOne’s Partner Awards, taking out the Asia Pacific Japan Partner of the Year, with Advantage Auckland Regional Manager Steve Smith further accelerating the company’s accolades by being named Top APJ Sales Person of the Year. The awards were made at SentinelOne’s APJ Partner Summit 2023 in Danang, Vietnam. Just 12 months prior, Advantage won the Partner of the Year award for SentinelOne’s ANZ region.

Headquartered in Palmerston North and with a growing national presence, managed security and ICT services specialist Advantage has delivered meteoric growth for California-headquartered SentinelOne in New Zealand. It has achieved results through hard work and dedication, investing in the vendor by upskilling and building the necessary capacity to generate and meet market demand. This includes becoming the first and only SIREN-certified (SentinelOne Incident Response Engineer) partner in New Zealand; the only partner with a local Security Operations Centre (SOC) providing SentinelOne MDR; and the only partner providing GCSB Malware Free Networks within the SentinelOne platform.

Smith says Advantage has incorporated the vendor’s machine learning technology into customer facing solutions in its quest to create secure environments for organisations across the country. “In just three years, SentinelOne has become a foundational part of our managed security services. Its technology has allowed us to scale our business rapidly by augmenting human resources with AI capabilities, ensuring that all our customers receive the best protection available.”

His confidence in the vendor is confirmed in the just-released Frost & Sullivan Frost Radar: Extended Detection and Response (XDR), 2023 innovation index which identifies SentinelOne as the XDR Growth Index Leader.

SentinelOne Regional Director, AUS & NZ Jason Duerden says awards are based on a comprehensive partner evaluation, covering Bookings, Training and Specialist Skills, Diversification of Offerings, and Marketing and GTM Strategy. “Advantage’s award is reflective of its performance due to a focus on many different streams with SentinelOne; Incident Response, MDR, Deployment/Support, Identity Threat Detection, Threat Hunting & Intel. It’s a ‘step up’ – and we have a very healthy ecosystem in A/NZ and APJ, with multiple partners qualifying. The Advantage team is adopting every part of our platform and program and has deep skills across all things SentinelOne, rapidly growing their business and rising to the top.”

Duerden describes the New Zealand market as developed and fast growing. “There’s considerable appetite for best-of-breed technologies supported by local businesses. Advantage is a cyber security powerhouse and this award is validation that their strategy stands up on the APJ stage.”

Continuing, Smith explains that SentinelOne is a key component in the AdvantageProtect division’s Managed Detection and Response capability. “SentinelOne’s Singularity provides unified prevention, detection, and response which, combined with our professionals secures our clients require without interfering with the flow of their operations.”

He says Advantage Managed Detection and Response is ideal for much of the New Zealand market, as it is an alternative to in-house Security Operations Centres which are generally fielded by larger companies.

This message has resonated, with Advantage achieving significant market success with the solution and in the process securing recognition as the vendor’s APJ Partner of the Year.

Smith’s direct involvement and engagement with Advantage’s customer base has resulted in his securing the Sales Person of the Year award, though he puts it down to a team effort. Duerden describes Smith as ‘customer first’. “His approach to consulting with his clients, education, and partnering set him apart from others. He is firstly a trusted advisor to his customers, not just another sales guy, an approach aligned with SentinelOne culture which has resulted in him successfully bring on client after client to the Advantage/S1 service.”

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