Premium: A glance at SentinelOne

After heavily focusing on the upcoming IPO of Confluent, I came away conflicted. While the underlying technology, Kafka, is vital and widely used, Confluent has had a few hiccups lately (a drop in revenue growth and NRR) in its quest to get users to pay for Kafka. So I plan on further watching them, to see if the metrics I focus on rise from here. [And, FYI, that research into streaming platforms has been spawning new directions of thought; I'll be talking more in-depth later about streaming analytics, and how edge networks, in particular, will become an ideal environment for handling real-time streaming & analytical capabilities.]

But today, let's jump back into the world of cybersecurity and Zero Trust, and take a look at SentinelOne, who is IPOing today under ticker "S". I not only wanted to review them in order to gauge my interest in the hypergrowth company, but also to see how this EPP/EDR cybersecurity platform stacks up against its primary competitor, CrowdStrike (my top holding). And once again, I'm torn after reviewing the company – which tends to mean it goes into the Watch List.  IMHO, any weaknesses seen in SentinelOne reinforce how formidable CrowdStrike is in this industry, made even more pronounced by how CrowdStrike is a few years ahead in scale.

[Reminder: if you aren't up on cybersecurity acronyms like EPP and EDR, you can look them up in my Flavors of Security series.]