Sophos and OpenAI Double Down
The security vendor and LLM leader are adding a new partnership focused specifically on MSPs to an earlier AI security alliance.
News worth exploring breaks shortly before my vendor interviews all the time. It’s rare for news to break during an interview, however.
And yet that’s very close to what happened during my Black Hat conversation with Sophos SVP & GM of global partner ecosystem and corporate development Chris Bell, which took place roughly an hour after Sophos revealed a newly inked alliance pact with OpenAI designed to … Well, neither Bell nor Sophos, in its press release about the deal, went too deep into specifics except to suggest that the new agreement adds a dedicated focus on MSPs to a relationship initiated when Sophos joined the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber partner program two months ago. How that focus expresses itself in the marketplace is TBD.
“Is it a bundle that we meet in the channel with? Is it areas where we can embed [their large language models] into our products or areas where we can embed our products into their large language models?” Bell asks. “We’re still early in that infancy, but in our conversations we recognize that we’re both trying to solve the same use cases and outcomes for our end customers.”
The upshot of that recognition appears headed to include (my words, not Bell’s) some combination of deeper integration of OpenAI models within Sophos products, stronger protection of those models via Sophos’s recently introduced AI Defense solution, and joint go-to-market efforts aimed at helping both companies grow enterprise market share, something Sophos has been keen to do since its acquisition of Secureworks and OpenAI has been pushing hard on this year.
“You are going to hear a lot more,” Bell says.