Sentinel CTO On Cisco Security, Broadcom-VMware And If AI Agents Will Take Your Job
An executive at solution provider all-star Sentinel Technologies explains what is driving Cisco security sales, providing workshops for worried Broadcom-VMware customers, and selling AI solutions to customers with high hopes for 2025.
IT guru Bob Keblusek is bullish about channel growth this year as Sentinel Technologies’ Microsoft and Cisco security businesses skyrockets alongside customers moving from AI proof-of-concepts (POCs) to business-ready platforms.
“With Cisco XDR and Microsoft with Copilot, the amount of power that AI is handing to our SOC agents is truly amazing,” said Keblusek, chief innovation and technology officer for solution provider security star Sentinel Technologies.
“We’ve seen a big uptick in Microsoft’s XDR, Modern Workplace, some of the AI capabilities and security to really leverage the same things the bad actors are leveraging to attack you, so you can detect and stop them closer to real-time than ever before,” said Keblusek.
[Related: AWS Launches New Agentic AI For Bedrock, ‘The Next Frontier In Computing’]
At the same time, cutting edge agentic AI technology is taking automation to “just a whole other level,” he said.
“AI is not going to take your job. Somebody that knows AI might take your job. That’s probably what we’re going to see playing out,” said Keblusek.
Keblusek is the longtime CTO of Sentinel Technologies, a top-notch cybersecurity, AI, networking, cloud and services specialist. The Downers Grove, Ill.-based solution provider was named to CRN’s 2025 Security 100 list, which highlights some of the world’s best MSPs with cloud-based security services. Sentinel has strategic partnerships with the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Broadcom-VMware and Dell Technologies.
In an interview with CRN, Keblusek explains what Sentinel is doing for Broadcom-VMware customers worried about price increases, his bets on Cisco and Microsoft security, and Sentinel’s AI and agentic AI strategy in 2025.
Sentinel is a longtime VMware partner. With Broadcom changing VMware’s portfolio and prices, what are you hearing from your Broadcom-VMware customers?
You’ve got customers asking what their options are to leave because their price has gone up as they’ve repackaged their licenses and offers.
There was obviously the disruption with our customers where: they wanted to renew, they’re were use to a certain price, and now they have to buy VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) or VvF (VMware vSphere Foundation) or some different bundling where they’re getting additional capabilities that they’re not using, but they’re also being charged more than they were used to in the past. That created quite a bit of a stir.
So we actually developed a workshop to run through all the value that VMware Broadcom was bringing to the customer, as well as what alternatives might be of interest.
What we ultimately found is everybody wanted to keep VMware, but they wanted to get their price down.
So we more recently developed a workshop of, ‘How do you adopt some of these great capabilities that you’re getting now? And how do we optimize your data center for the spend?’
Because a lot of our customers had really over provisioned things because they could. There wasn’t really a subscription penalty. They were buying additional hardware. Now, that’s coming back to bite them a little bit.
So we’re having the right size and having to look at even more modern server platforms with higher processing power to potentially reduce cores, but then they’ll adopt VCF and all the capabilities and really build private clouds that are AI ready.
As a leading Cisco security partner, how is Sentinel’s Cisco business?
Cisco doubled down on security a few years back and we’re really starting to see the return on that. Our security growth was up triple-digits last year. It’s been fantastic.
They’ve got some excellent leadership that they’ve brought in a few years back and we’re starting to see the products form. Really the conversation around their overall platform has been resonating with the market.
Some of their new releases like Cisco’s XDR and their secure access are outstanding. We’ve had a lot of customer interest to either move from other platforms to Cisco XDR, or adopt and replace things like traditional VPN services and cloud access services with a more unified platform from Cisco. So it’s been really, really strong on the security side of things.
We’ve seen a big push forward with Cisco, but also with Microsoft. Microsoft is one of our biggest growing practices and a lot of it is around security. A lot of its around Modern Work and Copilot as well.
We’ve seen a big uptick in Microsoft’s XDR, Modern Workplace, some of the AI capabilities and security to really leverage the same things that the bad actors are leveraging to attack you, so you can detect and stop them more closer to real time than ever before.
Is CEO Chuck Robbins the right person to lead Cisco in the AI era?
For us, what Chuck’s done has been excellent. Some of his leadership like Cisco’s [Chief Product Officer] Jeetu Patel has brought some innovation back. He’s got a great team under him as well. That’s where you start to see their security story really tightening up and resonating now over some of the moves that Chuck was orchestrating over the past number of years.
Financially, they’re doing fairly well. They went through their big Splunk acquisition. Overall, the execution is good.
We’re starting to see some of the benefits today.
AI, generative AI and agentic AI are all big bets for Sentinel. I’ve actually got a team under me in my office of innovation that focuses exclusively now on AI, both internally and externally. We call it our Fusion AI strategy.
It’s really about being the thought leaders with our customers to talk about and education on. So we need to educate them on AI because everybody’s curious. But if you’re a manufacturer or you’re in healthcare, it’s not your everyday job to stay up to speed. So we help our customers bridge that gap with our knowledge.
We also partner with Gartner. So we’re having constant communications with them in what they’re seeing in the market from the thousands of customers they talk to on a regular basis.
Then we’re also using a lot of use cases our own, where we’ve developed things internally or we’ve developed things for customers, as well as industry use cases that we see in the market to have conversations with our customers on how they might adopt AI.
Agentic is starting to surface, where you’re going to start to see the automation make of the decision making and taking action. That’s something that we’re also on top of and talking to our customers about.
Customers are adopting generative AI and even traditional AI right now.
They’re starting to do POCs. And the POCs are really moving from the art-of-the-possible into business ready platforms.
With things like Cisco XDR and Microsoft with Copilot, the amount of power that AI is handing to our SOC agents is truly amazing.
For example, you can get a SOC agent out of college that has a baseline education and they’re just learning how to do an investigation the traditional way, which I still think is important to build that knowledge foundation. But then now you can just go into these tools and ask AI anything.
And then AI will give you in a natural processing language, ‘Here’s what’s happening with this particular attack. Here’s what assets have been involved in this attack. This attack is speaking to an outside entity, and here’s where that entity is.’ Then it’ll suggest, ‘Would you like to take this action?’
Where I see agentic happening is, what does that level-zero or level-one analyst look like now? Because now an agent could potentially take those base level actions that you’ve allowed it to take in near real time.
You start to see those things start happening to where we can respond to the attack with an agent, instead of a human having to even initiate the automation.
Automation has been the thing for many years. This just takes it to a whole other level.