Optiv CEO On New Intelligence System: ‘There’s Nothing On The Planet Like This’

The recently launched Optiv Market System has been ‘game-changing’ for how the cybersecurity powerhouse is serving clients and working with its security industry partners, Optiv CEO Kevin Lynch tells CRN.

For cybersecurity solution and service provider powerhouse Optiv, the recent launch of a data-driven intelligence system has been “game-changing” for both the company’s work with clients and industry partnerships, Optiv CEO Kevin Lynch told CRN.

Unveiled in October 2024, the Optiv Market System (OMS) is a proprietary security architecture that provides insights across a client’s entire cybersecurity posture, spanning infrastructure, identity, operations, application security and other key segments.

Leveraging Optiv’s massive data lake, the intelligence system helps its teams to approach customers with advance knowledge on what the client’s next security needs are likely to be — while also enabling campaigns with vendor partners to be far more targeted than ever before possible, executives said.

For customers today, “all of their stakeholders are asking more of them,” Lynch said. “We built Optiv Market System so that we could intelligently serve them against a standard reference architecture — to really think about, how do we help that client to reduce complexity and get more yield per dollar of spend?”

This can enable everything from helping clients to rationalize and consolidate their tech stacks, to identifying underused tools, to increasing the return-on-investment from spending on cybersecurity solutions and services, according to Denver-based Optiv, No. 28 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025.

Ultimately, “there’s nothing on the planet like this,” Lynch said. “We’re the only ones with this — and as we’re using it, it’s getting better by the day.”

While the deployment of the system naturally faced an “adoption curve” at first, “we’re now at full efficacy with this. And you can see it — and it’s incredible,” he said. “The partners — where we’ve gone shoulder to shoulder and are working on this together, opening our data and the visibility — it’s game-changing.”

As an example, when it comes to one of Optiv’s top partners, cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike, many enterprise customers will already be using one of the company’s tools somewhere in their organization, Lynch noted. However, CrowdStrike now offers 29 different modules — and the Optiv Market System can enable rapid identification of where the major opportunities are to deliver more of those capabilities to a customer based on their specific needs, according to Lynch.

“There’s tons of opportunity to help a client transit that unknown,” he said.

‘The Power Of Platform’

Without a doubt, Optiv has excelled when it comes to helping to more effectively bring new CrowdStrike capabilities to customers, CrowdStrike Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard told CRN.

“Where they’ve done a good job is say, ‘I have [several] thousand CrowdStrike customers — now I can start to cohort them based off of what they’re using, and run different predictive plays or strategies to help them use more, consolidate more, do more on the Falcon platform,” Bernard said.

While CrowdStrike has its own tools to help its solution and service provider partners to see exactly what products a customer has deployed and make recommendations on future products to suggest, Optiv has “done their own magic” in addition to that, he said.

“They’re operating at a scale and size where they can run multiple experiments and plays at the same time and keep perfecting their own model of upselling. And I think that’s the power of platform,” Bernard said.

‘Skyrocketing’ Win Rates

Across the board with Optiv’s vendor partners, OMS is allowing the company to “have a more targeted go-to-market conversation,” said Scott Goree, senior vice president for partners, alliances and ecosystems at Optiv.

For instance, during a conversation with a vendor partner, Optiv teams might be able to use AI recommendations in OMS to reveal a propensity for customers in a particular vertical and region to buy the vendor’s products, Goree said.

That can then be the basis for the companies to drive a “go-to-market campaign or thought leadership webinar — or [other] pipeline generation in that targeted way — in that region for that vertical,” he said.

In other words, “instead of just a spray-and-pray marketing campaign, we can be very targeted,” Goree said. “And we’ve seen our win rates skyrocket when we use this approach.”

A Stronger Position

Meanwhile, when interacting with customer CISOs, Optiv CRO John Hurley said the company’s teams are also able to have very different conversations than in the past thanks to OMS.

“Now, when our teams show up, we’re not saying, ‘Tell me the top three things that are bugging you at night,’” Hurley said. “We have a very good idea of what’s likely — based on their peer sets, what their install base is and where they’re looking — and how we can help them.”

This puts Optiv in a much stronger position to advise clients on future tech capabilities as well as advisory or managed opportunities, he said.

“We’re now differentiating ourselves from other partners out there that don’t have a tool capability like this, because we’ve got over 30 patents on it,” Hurley said. “It’s really advancing how we show up to a client in a much more material way, and then how we help clients through that journey of [security] complexity.”