How Optiv Defined The Security Channel—And Is Transforming Partnership For The AI Era

According to Optiv CEO Kevin Lynch, pioneering what it means to be a cybersecurity powerhouse in the channel was just the beginning. Now, Optiv is making a bid to revolutionize cybersecurity partnership again—and vendor executives tell CRN it’s just what’s needed for securing the AI boom ahead.

**F**or years now, CrowdStrike executive Daniel Bernard has been hearing a recurring question from solution and service provider partners: “‘How do we become the next Optiv?’”

The answer, inevitably, is that while partners have a variety of routes to up-leveling on cybersecurity, Optiv is in many ways one-of-a-kind, according to Bernard, chief business officer at Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike.

That’s because Optiv, a Denver-based powerhouse provider of cybersecurity solutions and services, has not just been a trailblazer in the channel, but has even bolstered its enviable position amid the rapid shift to AI adoption in recent years, he said.

Looking back, “there was a time when the mainline, large technology conglomerates didn't have robust cyber practices,” Bernard said. “Optiv emerged and built one.”

[RELATED: Optiv CEO Kevin Lynch On Why AI Won’t Displace The Channel]

Much of the rest of the channel followed suit with massive investments into cybersecurity practices, laying the groundwork for the heyday in security that the channel has seen in recent years, he said.

“I do think Optiv should be credited with starting the focused revolution in the channel for cybersecurity as a core growth engine, a core profit center, a core focus area in selling technology,” Bernard said. “Cybersecurity was a side dish, not a main dish [in the channel]. The success of Optiv, and then the success that they’ve inspired across their ecosystem of competitors, has made cybersecurity a main dish.”

For Optiv, the largest pure-play security company on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500 at No. 28, defining what it means to be a cybersecurity heavyweight in the channel has been just a prelude to the company’s current phase: providing the pivotal security advisory, implementation and management necessary for enabling the AI era.

Solution providers like Optiv are no strangers to the concept of the channel partner program, the mechanism through which technology vendors across the industry manage and govern their channel relationships. But as partnership goes both ways, Optiv has taken the concept one step further by developing its own full-fledged partner program for the technology vendors it teams with.

The latest version of the program, Optiv One, doubles down on transparency and predictability in ways that should only deepen the trust between Optiv and its vendor partners amid the push to capture unprecedented AI opportunities ahead, according to Optiv CEO Kevin Lynch.

“Servicing and securing agentic [AI] is going to be a massive business for us—it already is,” Lynch said in an interview with CRN. “I think we’ve set the stage with our partner program.”

Optiv One constitutes a rethinking of how the channel operates, not just a program refresh, according to Optiv executives. Key updates include adding greater clarity around operating expectations with the disclosure of Optiv’s rules of engagement, according to executives.

While the company’s vendor partners already disclose their rules of engagement, Optiv is unique in doing so on the channel partner side, said Optiv CRO John Hurley.

“There’s not another VAR partner out there today that publishes that,” Hurley said.

For Optiv, cementing even greater trust in its partnerships will also become crucial as AI continues to create an array of growth opportunities—as well as a new set of pressures that could expose cracks in channel partnerships, executives said.

“What we’re doing is we’re making hardline commitments to our partners in terms of how we will both operate, what we will do based on certain scenarios, how we will invest in creating more demand, opportunity, visibility, market awareness,” Lynch said.

Indeed, the disclosure of Optiv’s rules of engagement significantly reduces any potential ambiguity or friction around partnering together, according to Joe Raymond, senior director for Americas national channel sales at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Palo Alto Networks.

The program builds on the rich heritage between Optiv and Palo Alto Networks, providing a basis for partnership that is “very transparent, very consistent, very predictable,” Raymond said.

All in all, the program underscores why Optiv has the stature that it does within the channel and cybersecurity worlds, he said.

Without a doubt, he said, Optiv has “helped put us into a position of where we are today.”

A Security‑Only Powerhouse

The vision for a national-scale, security-only solution provider was achieved with the formation of Optiv in 2015 through the merger of two longtime channel security players, Accuvant and FishNet Security, which were each founded decades earlier.

Private equity firm KKR acquired a majority stake in the company in 2017.

However, the arrival of Lynch, formerly a senior partner at Deloitte, as CEO in 2020 christened a new era for the company.

Under Lynch’s leadership, Optiv has expanded to approximately 2,500 employees today from about 1,600 when he joined, according to the company, which said sales for 2025 hit approximately $3.8 billion while its customer roster sits at about 6,000 active clients. Details of the privately held company’s past financial performance were not disclosed.

Most of Optiv’s growth under Lynch has been organic, with the exception of the 2023 acquisition of 125-person federal solution provider ClearShark, which now operates under the name Optiv + ClearShark.

In March, Optiv announced an agreement to extend the maturity of its existing debt with creditors, following a lengthy process of “re-evaluating our capital structure,” Lynch said. The agreement extends the maturity of two credit facilities to August 2028 and August 2029, respectively.

It’s a major move to enable Optiv’s ambitions, Lynch said, putting the company in a “great, healthy position to prosecute this growth agenda over the next several years ahead.”

As it pursues that growth agenda, Optiv will stay steadfast in its exclusive focus on cybersecurity. While that was an “audacious goal” at one point, eschewing the generalist role and operating as a security-only organization remains a top differentiator for Optiv in the highly competitive channel, according to Lynch.

Executives at many vendor partners said that this pure-play security orientation has indeed proven to be among the big advantages of working with Optiv. Because cybersecurity is “in their DNA,” it’s far easier to move quickly in solving pressing security needs for customers, said Palo Alto Networks’ Raymond.

“Everyone within the Optiv organization is 100 percent, maniacally focused on cyber,” he said. “We’re not having to pull in people from different factions or departments because we’re aligned on cyber from start to finish.”

It’s also advantageous because most customers want an integrated set of security capabilities from more than one vendor, something that Optiv is eminently well-positioned to help enable, said Zscaler Channel Chief Anthony Torsiello.

“They’re so specialized around security and really all aspects of it,” said Torsiello, senior vice president for global partner ecosystem at San Jose, Calif.-based Zscaler. “Our customers are looking for more than just zero trust. So when we partner together, they bring to bear their other expertise.”

There’s also no question that one of Optiv’s biggest differentiators is its propensity for investing in—and even leading with—newer technologies that go beyond core products, CrowdStrike’s Bernard said.

As a result, Optiv was among the first solution provider partners to begin working closely with CrowdStrike on utilizing its Falcon Flex subscription model, accelerating the process for customers to add new CrowdStrike tools beyond its core EDR (endpoint detection and response), he said.

“We sell a lot of EDR—but the EDR sells itself when you sell Next-Gen SIEM and when you sell other [products]. And Optiv understands that,” Bernard said. “And so if I look at their pipeline with us, it’s all in our new products. And I don’t worry about them selling our other [core] products because they’re going to do that anyway. But they make the investment and organizationally focus on our road map, our technology. They turn our technology road map into a go-to-market plan.”

Optiv’s rare cybersecurity pedigree also comes into play when working with newer vendors and technologies, vendor executives said.

At Netskope, for instance, the partnership with Optiv got underway when the vendor was still an emerging player focused on CASB (cloud access security broker) technology, recalled Christina Pulley, vice president for North America channel sales at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Netskope.

Unlike with many solution providers at the time, with Optiv “there wasn’t much educating that we had to do,” Pulley said. “Just because of where they came from, Optiv innately understood the market and were ready to build a plan and go after customers together.”

Ever since that initial phase of the partnership launched around 2018, “the consistency over the years has been really strong,” she said. The close relationship with Optiv, in fact, has been among the key partnerships that helped propel Netskope from a startup to its successful initial public offering last year, Pulley noted.

All along the way, “they have been a true partner to Netskope,” Pulley said.

Recent years, meanwhile, have seen Optiv turn its penchant for what’s new into helping to lead the way on enabling secure usage of AI and agentic technologies. In 2024, Optiv debuted its AI Security Services offering, covering a range of needs for AI adoption from education and strategy to governance and application security.

“Having worked with Optiv for a good part of my career, they are always looking for the next hot thing. They’re looking for how they can solve complex problems for their customers,” Pulley said. “They do a very good job at understanding where the market’s going.”

Driving Managed Services, Consolidation

Other major hallmarks of Lynch’s tenure at Optiv have included driving the expansion of its managed security services offering, which became a crucial growth area for both the company and the broader market as security teams increasingly struggled to find talent.

Optiv and its predecessor companies had already established a large base of customers, but Lynch “was particularly instrumental in driving that services focus coming from his heritage at Deloitte,” said Mark McClain, founder and CEO of Austin, Texas-based SailPoint.

This equated to Optiv building on its deep relationships with the customer from an advisory and resale perspective to being able to “take care of everything they need” via a suite of managed services, McClain said.

The increased emphasis on managed security services—which landed Optiv an Elite 150 ranking in CRN’s MSP 500 for 2026—has also come as complexity and tool sprawl have surged, executives said. These challenges have exceeded even the capacity of many enterprise clients, according to Lynch.

Today, the typical security professional at an enterprise must have expertise in numerous disparate tools, he noted.

“Can they be sufficient at it? Yes. Can they be expert at it? No,” Lynch said. “It creates the necessity for them to think about solution providers that are going to fill in that gap, a la Optiv, and managed service providers that can take over some of that for them, a la Optiv.”

Thus, while many customers do continue to seek out tool consolidation, it’s not necessarily about reducing vendors, Lynch said. Instead, it’s about integration of telemetry data, he said, “where they get better yield out of the tools.”

The launch of the Optiv Market System (OMS) in 2024 was another game-changer for the company, according to executives at Optiv and its vendor partners. The data-driven intelligence system has helped Optiv and its vendor partners to better identify specific customer needs, executives said.

OMS has given a massive boost to the ability of Optiv and its vendor partners to better target the right solutions and services to customers, and it’s especially coming into play amid the AI boom, according to Hurley.

CISOs are being tasked to go quickly around enabling secure AI adoption but are not being provided unlimited budgets, he said.

“Through OMS, we have an ability to show a client what their tech stack looks like [and identify] areas of overlap,” Hurley said. “OMS, to us, continues to be a differentiator. If you look into the market today, there’s people out there that think they have an OMS. They don’t.”

Committing To Transparency

The launch of the Optiv One partner program marks the next big chapter for the channel stalwart’s partnership strategy, executives said.

Calling it “one of the more important things we’ve done over the years,” Lynch said that Optiv One is squarely aimed at deepening the company’s key vendor relationships even further—at a time of both massive opportunity and evolving customer needs.

“Optiv One, for us, has really been about getting to the point where we are prioritizing those partners in a way that’s commensurate with our clients’ expectations,” he said.

Ultimately, “we’re going to hardline commit to one another. We’re going to be public about that,” Lynch said. “We’re going to do that with our largest, most vibrant partners.”

Optiv One’s architects previously spent decades working on the vendor side, which provided crucial insight for the design of the new program, executives said. The team included Hurley, formerly a longtime Cisco executive, as well as Cisco veteran Hunter Haverty, Optiv’s senior director for partner programs and operations.

That vendor channel management background shines through in major program updates unveiled in February such as the disclosure of Optiv’s rules of engagement, executives said. The rules of engagement provide clear expectations and commitments for how Optiv and its vendor partners will work together across different scenarios, including operationally and in the field.

“It’s all about, how do we make sure that they know how we want to operate when we partner with them?” Hurley said. “We want to be up front and transparent about it.”

The result is that Optiv One is designed to drive the same level of visibility that solution providers would expect from their vendor partners, executives said.

In the fast-moving and highly complex security market, trust is everything when it comes to partnerships between security vendors and solution providers, said Chari Rhoades-Schambari, vice president for Americas channel and partner sales at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Proofpoint.

And the level of transparency in the Optiv One program, she said, is “not something you often see from partners—especially partners of their size.”

Solidifying the partnerships in this way is also important for Optiv given the inevitable pressure from some customers to go direct with their vendor and cut out the partner, Palo Alto Networks’ Raymond said.

One such situation arose recently, where Palo Alto Networks received a request from a large enterprise customer to go direct and bypass Optiv, Hurley said.

“The team [at Palo Alto Networks] pushed back and said, ‘No, we won’t do this business direct. We will take it through Optiv. They are our partner of choice,’” he said. “We’ve seen that over and over again.”

Likewise, the leadership team at Optiv has played a crucial role in setting the right tone for driving joint growth in security with customers, vendor executives said.

Lynch has demonstrated deep “CEO-level commitment,” and is very up front and specific “about what we represent to him and what he’s able to do for us,” CrowdStrike’s Bernard said. Recognition for Lynch’s execution at Optiv included his capturing of the Best Solution Provider CEO of the Year award as part of the inaugural 2025 CRN Best of the Channel Awards.

Meanwhile, Optiv’s hire in 2024 of industry veteran Hurley “has been a game-changer for them,” Bernard said. “Keeping this organization together—maintaining that consistency across the whole country [while] growing—is not easy.”

Major growth milestones at Optiv included becoming the first solution provider to reach $1 billion in cumulative sales with CrowdStrike in 2023, before going on to surpass the $1 billion sales mark with Proofpoint in 2025.

The company is also routinely recognized with industry accolades, including 2025 Partner of the Year awards from Google Cloud, which named Optiv its North America Partner of the Year, as well as CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, SailPoint and Proofpoint.

On the whole, Optiv’s push to strengthen its vendor partnerships with its new program and deepened commitments should pay increasing dividends as the AI push accelerates, executives said.

Optiv’s North Star with its vendor partners right now is “truly working as an ecosystem [and being] committed to one another,” Lynch said. “You could say it’s the purest manifestation of a partnership.”