Wiz is “well on the way” to reaching its 100% channel goal, its UK&I channel boss has told IT Channel Oxygen as he teased the upcoming launch of its MSSP programme.
Dubbed the fastest-growing start-up in history, Wiz in March agreed to be acquired by Google for $32bn.
Should the deal survive the scrutiny of the US Department of Justice and close successfully, the cloud security specialist will be integrated into Google’s $49bn cloud unit.
“We’re now well on the way”
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen at Wiz’s new London hub, Director of UKI Channels & Alliances, Nick Ross, said its decision to move to a 100% channel model was driven by customers.
Wiz traditionally sold mainly direct via the three major hyperscaler marketplaces, before opting to embrace partners last February, Ross explained.
“That was mainly driven by what we see from customers,” Ross said.
“Often the trust is held in the partners. They’ve known the customers for five, six, ten years, and the customers want them to be included and to support them on their journey. Now that you can do that in the hyperscaler marketplaces with partners, that’s exactly our sweet spot.”
Wiz wants to generate 35% of its revenues from EMEA by the end of 2025 after launching its London hub last August. It houses a new R&D team, spearheaded by Wiz Co-founder Roy Reznik, and is designed to eventually house 100 staff in total.
When Ross started last May, Wiz had 22 UK partners, over half of which it “didn’t have any sort of meaningful traction with”.
It pared this back to five partners. This includes Softcat, whose Cyber Security Alliances Lead William Day recently characterised its Wiz partnership as “one of hypergrowth”.
“That was to really to go deeper and help us get scale,” Ross said.
“In that first nine months of consolidation, we are over 4X our partner-sourced pipeline from those five partners.”
Now Wiz is looking to cautiously expand its UK partner base, with Google partner Qodea among those to recently come on board.
“We consider our partner and channel team as facilitators, but really it’s the field that own those partner relationships,” Ross said.
“It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, but we’re now well on the way to 100% channel.”
“It solves a massive problem”
Asked what lies behind Wiz’s feat of becoming the fastest software company in history to hit a respective $100m and $500m ARR within 18 months and five years, Ross explains it “solves a massive problem” for customers when it comes to cloud security.
“Beforehand, you’d get very vertical silos of security,” Ross explained.
“You’d have your code security teams in DevSecOps, you’d have your cloud security and infrastructure teams, and you’d have your SOC team. They’re all very much head down, looking at their own view of the world.
“But an attacker doesn’t really care how your team is structured; they’re looking for any way they can break into the environment and laterally move and exfiltrate data and cause problems.
“The cool thing about Wiz is it’s changing that vertical siloed approach and giving everyone that shared context. A developer can see the impact of their code on their company’s security posture and take the necessary [steps] to prevent that issue right at the source.”
Ross picked out Orca Security as a competitor, adding that cyber giants Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike are also both moving more into its “fast-growing” stomping ground.s
“What we see for Wiz and our partners is that what we’ve built is pretty unique across the whole development, to cloud to runtime lifecycle,” he said.
“Not to give you a sales pitch, but it gives partners that breadth where they can land with something and they’ve got a very natural conversation to then walk into a new set of stakeholders.”
Ross’ comments come following a series of high-profile cyber-attacks that have pierced our daily lives. IT Channel Oxygen this week counted down the top 14 of 2025 so far, based on the views of a panel of 12 UK MSSP leaders.
“Dangerous with a demo”
Ross also teased the launch of an MSSP programme designed to help it reach smaller customers via partners.
Wiz is currently working on the legal, financial and rules-of-engagement fine print to make the programme a reality, he indicated.
“If you think about an organisation with a small cloud footprint, in the UK that’s often an outsourced, ‘manage-my-cloud-for-me’ [scenario],” Ross said.
“[Given] the cost of sale to do that on an individual-rep basis, if we can work with the MSSPs to embed Wiz into their cloud offerings and help them provide a new service and secure their customers’ clouds, that’s something I’m really excited about.”
As a techie-turned-sales and channel exec, Ross said he “absolutely loves working at Wiz because of all the new stuff that gets brought out”.
“I can be dangerous with the demo,” he warned.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
