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.”