A client cut 250 thousand dollars from a 750 thousand dollar licensing bill in about a day, and the only thing that changed was who was looking at it. From the show floor at Black Hat USA 2026, a conversation about what security leaders are actually asking for when they stop taking the sales call.
Automation and AI have flooded the sales and marketing side of the market, and Michael Parisi, Chief Growth Officer at Steel Patriot Partners, says the security leaders on the receiving end were already past capacity. The pitch tends to lead with the product rather than the problem. So many CISOs have stopped taking direct sales calls and started asking a different question: what VAR do you work with, and who can I buy you through?
That routing puts weight back on partners who know where a program has been and how to move it forward. Parisi describes a partner meeting during the week with RegScale and Wiz, with Steel Patriot Partners in the services role, and the recognition that the company is moving toward systems integration with engineering at the center. Software providers can supply the product. Aligning and configuring it against a specific set of business expectations is a different job.
What happens when that job has no owner? Tools get bought and the return never shows up. Parisi sees organizations spending on best of breed and failing to recognize ROI because the tools are not being used or configured against the business objective. The correction is engineering work rather than another purchase.
One client was told by its board to cut a significant portion of the IT and information security budget. Steel Patriot Partners looked for overlap, found three tools accomplishing the same business outcome, met the number, and exceeded it on cost savings. Parisi attributes the underlying problem to years of deferred maintenance on the stack, from teams with the appetite to buy tools and without the time to configure them.
He expects the consolidation the cloud market saw a decade ago to reach cybersecurity tooling and GRC, and puts a number on it: 48 main GRC providers today, roughly five within five years. Good enough, configured appropriately, beats best of breed sitting idle.
For CISOs building the next budget cycle, Parisi recommends bringing the sourcing closer in. Go to your anchor partners, ask what they are running next year and what worked this year, and skip the attempt to talk to everybody. Steel Patriot Partners co-founder Jason Ford has a line that fits alongside it. Have an open mind.
This is a Brand Spotlight. A Brand Spotlight is a ~15 minute conversation designed to explore the guest, their company, and what makes their approach unique. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#spotlight
GUEST
Michael Parisi, Chief Growth Officer, Steel Patriot Partners
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-parisi-4009b2261/
RESOURCES
Black Hat USA 2026 event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/black-hat-usa-2026-cybersecurity-event-coverage-in-las-vegas
Steel Patriot Partners: https://www.steelpatriotpartners.com
Steel Patriot Partners at Black Hat USA 2026: https://www.steelpatriotpartners.com/events/black-hat-usa-2026
Steel Patriot Partners Insights: https://resources.steelpatriotpartners.com
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KEYWORDS
michael parisi, steel patriot partners, sean martin, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, brand spotlight, black hat usa 2026, ciso budget, channel partners, var, systems integrator, grc consolidation, security tool sprawl, licensing costs, roi, configuration, compliance, cybersecurity engineering, regscale, wiz
The Budget Is Already Spent. The ROI Is in the Configuration. | A Brand Spotlight at Black Hat USA 2026 with Michael Parisi, Chief Growth Officer of Steel Patriot Partners | Hosted by Sean Martin
[00:00:00] Sean Martin: Michael.
[00:00:11] Michael Parisi: How are you, Sean?
[00:00:12] Sean Martin: Here we are, man.
[00:00:13] Michael Parisi: How many days in are we now?
[00:00:14] Sean Martin: A number of days in.
[00:00:17] Michael Parisi: Still standing?
[00:00:18] Sean Martin: We're still standing. Do we ever stop standing?
[00:00:20] Michael Parisi: Amen. That's part of the problem.
[00:00:22] Sean Martin: We're straight overnight, right? Standing overnight, standing a few minutes sleeping. We're standing because of all the good conversations we're having.
[00:00:29] Michael Parisi: Yeah.
[00:00:30] Sean Martin: We've been connected in different settings, for different dinners and events and things, and obviously around the show floor. A lot of interesting conversations happen.
[00:00:41] Michael Parisi: Yeah, yeah.
[00:00:43] Sean Martin: So we're going to talk about that quickly, though. Your role at Steel Patriot Partners. We're going to get into some of the things you do with the organization as well.
[00:00:51] Michael Parisi: Yeah. So, Chief Growth Officer, Steel Patriot Partners. Responsibility for our strategic partner program, our channel partner program, and everything on the sales and marketing side. But I think a lot of the themes, and I know we're going to get into this, definitely speak to partners, right? And partner motion, and some of the conversations that we were talking about earlier with a lot of the CISOs that are here. It's definitely leaning in that direction.
[00:01:19] Sean Martin: Right. So the days of direct sales. I think it's always a pendulum, right? Or a circle, a cycle. It is a swing. But what are you hearing? Because I think CISOs are overwhelmed, right?
[00:01:34] Michael Parisi: Yeah. I mean, I want to say the days of direct sales are quote unquote dead. But unfortunately, automation and AI has kind of flooded the market from a sales and marketing perspective. And as a result, CISOs were already inundated before, right? Like, they couldn't respond to everything. But now they don't even know how to sort through what's real and what isn't real. And I think the marketing and the sales pitch is more about the product as opposed to what problem are you trying to solve for.
[00:02:08] Sean Martin: Right.
[00:02:09] Michael Parisi: So what's interesting, a theme that I've seen over the last couple of days talking to my network, is that a lot of CISOs are not taking direct sales calls anymore. Not that they were doing a lot before, but now they can't even keep up with them. So they're looking for people within their network, or partners, or even a good partner at a VAR, for example, to go to and say, help me figure this out. This is my business problem. What are you seeing out there? Solution and tool agnostic, in order to solve for the business problem, right? There's more and more of that. And even some of the conversations I've been having directly, some of the questions that I got from some of the new relationships I've made, is what VAR do you work with? Who can I buy you through?
[00:02:59] Sean Martin: Right.
[00:03:00] Michael Parisi: Who can I go to to buy you through? So there's motivation around that. And I think it speaks to the old school trust from some of those partners that's starting to come back.
[00:03:08] Sean Martin: Yeah. So I'm hearing very similar things from folks that I'm talking to as well. And I think it's, I'm just going to throw this out there because we've talked about this, the journey. So yes, I have a business objective, but I need somebody who knows what I've been doing, where I need to go, how I'm going to move from here to there. And we all know that you can't just buy something off the shelf and have it work perfectly. And so you can get a trusted partner to help you identify, maybe narrow down the landscape, purchase the right things for that. But then actually getting it to achieve the objective is a whole other story.
[00:03:58] Michael Parisi: Yeah. It's funny. So we had a great partner meeting yesterday, more to come on this in the future coming out of Black Hat, but a partnership with RegScale and Wiz and us as a services partner. And I think the light bulb that went off for us was that we're becoming more of an SI, in that direction. It's engineering at the core. But you talk to Wiz, you talk to a number of these different solutions, and the biggest problem is people will buy, but they don't know how to scale and implement and configure. And the software providers, rightfully so, are like, well, we can't figure that out from a business perspective. Like, we have product, we have great enhancements, great solutions. You need somebody to align and configure that so that it meets your business expectations and needs. And I mean, just over the last three days, that's what most of our conversations have been about. We've got the stack.
[00:04:58] Sean Martin: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:59] Michael Parisi: Can you help us evaluate it? Is it the right stack? What should we throw out? What should we keep? How do we configure it to meet our business objectives? Right? Seems simple, but it's difficult.
[00:05:10] Sean Martin: Right. And last year's business objectives are different from this year's, and can be different from next year's. And probably even as AI continues to make things more live, right, if you will, or real time, maybe another way to look at it, I think business plans will also, and the stack will also, be real time. And how, I mean, agile development with AI, coding and all this stuff, it's going to change the way people do business, change the way they implement their stack, manage their stack, and they're going to need somebody to help them along that path.
[00:05:49] Michael Parisi: Correct. And I think the other theme that we're seeing, not just with tokens, but consumption based models, a lot of organizations don't have a good handle on that. It's kind of like, well, it's going to cost whatever it's going to take because it's something that we need to do. I had a conversation with a partner this morning about something as simple as licensing costs, where one client, a collective client of ours, was paying 750 grand in licensing costs. They went to a particular VAR, and within probably a day, they shaved 250 grand off their licensing costs, just because somebody looked at it independently. So I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit in some of those traditional models that AI isn't necessarily going to solve for. And that's become a big part of the business owner's first conversation.
[00:06:44] Sean Martin: And certainly there's no lack of, I think every company has a platform now, right? Which basically says now you have a bunch of platforms. Not just a bunch of products, but also platforms. Some things connect, some may API to each other. Most don't. And somebody has to connect them. So do organizations hire engineers to connect all this stuff, and engineers to respond to incidents, and engineers to manage AI, and all that stuff? So I think engineering, though we've abstracted stuff so wildly with platforms and APIs and everything, there's going to need to be coding.
[00:07:33] Michael Parisi: There is. And this came up last night, again with a CISO within our network. We were talking about identity. How long have we been talking about identity? Identity's still a mess.
[00:07:45] Sean Martin: Thirty years or something.
[00:07:46] Michael Parisi: Still a mess, right? Nothing is integrated. But trying to have one single source of truth, not just for identity but for all of these systems, is a big challenge, right? The only way to do it right now is basically some level of custom engineering. Even if there's a tool out there, if it's not configured appropriately, you're not going to get that single source of truth. So yeah, we're seeing a big movement in that direction.
[00:08:13] Sean Martin: And when you're talking to clients that you've helped identify, so if they have a business need, you kind of evaluate what that is. Some of it may be compliance driven, and some of it may be security and risk management driven. You help them say, all right, given this objective, here's how we might approach this and help you deliver against that.
[00:08:40] Michael Parisi: Yeah, and not only that, but we share what we do for our own organization. I mean, look, my company's full of engineers. They love to geek out at this stuff. So when they find a new hack, no pun intended, or something that's worked better for us from a business standpoint, they want to scream it from the mountaintops and share it with all of our clients and be like, hey, have you considered this? Like, we just found this out. This has made our business more efficient, which allows us to provide more effective service for our clients. And then we pass those tidbits on as well.
[00:09:14] Sean Martin: Because even in my own experience in talking to a lot of folks over the years of building and delivering products, there's the cost of the software, right? Cost of the license, cost of maintenance, subscription, whatever it is. Certainly the cost of deployment and management. But now we have other factors, like keeping things connected. So I'm wondering how you look at the costing, and you mentioned the tokens, right? The biggest change recently. But how do you help picture the return on all these investments, where there may be bits and bytes of things that aren't really factored into the cost?
[00:09:53] Michael Parisi: Exactly. So back, I mean, we had a conversation the other day about journeys, right, and where people are in their journeys. That is a big question that comes up a lot, which is, look, from an overall cost perspective, what's the ROI associated with this tool that I have? And what we often find is you're not recognizing the ROI because you're not using it appropriately, or it's not configured appropriately. So there's this false expectation that I spent all this money on this solution. You have best of breed, right? If you configure it appropriately, then you could recognize the ROI associated with that. That takes an engineer.
[00:10:31] Sean Martin: Right.
[00:10:32] Michael Parisi: And unfortunately, there's obviously a lot of software sales folks that that's not their game. We don't expect them to be in that game. But you need to have some level of engineering support. And I go back to this, like, traditional SI services. I think they're back. They're coming back.
[00:10:50] Sean Martin: It seems like it. I'm hearing more and more.
[00:10:53] Michael Parisi: Exactly.
[00:10:54] Sean Martin: So, I don't know, pick a recent engagement and talk through the path of that journey of, we need this outcome, here's where we are, how you help them either directly or through your ecosystem to achieve X, Y, and Z.
[00:11:14] Michael Parisi: So I think a good example, a client of ours had their own security stack from a tooling perspective. Had a lot of big solutions, you name it, right? With traditional GRC, ServiceNow, et cetera. Was asked by the board to cut a significant amount of the IT and information security budget.
[00:11:34] Sean Martin: Right.
[00:11:35] Michael Parisi: So they came to us and said, how can you help us? What can we consolidate? Are there configurations where we could recognize more ROI associated with that, et cetera. And we were able to hit their number and exceed it from a cost savings perspective. And we're in the process of building and strengthening their information security. And I think it was just years of deferred maintenance, but deferred maintenance relative to the stack. I mean, you get a bunch of cybersecurity people that are so excited to buy tools and add to the stack, but they don't have the resources or the time to configure and actually use it. So it was one of those situations.
[00:12:16] Sean Martin: And maybe some insights on what you brought to that conversation that they may have been able to come to the same conclusion themselves, but either there was a blocker or lack of time. How do you unlock it?
[00:12:32] Michael Parisi: I think the main thing was analyzing overlap, right? So looking at all these solutions and the tools that they have, to say, why do you have three different tools that can all accomplish the same business outcome? Pick one. Maybe nothing is best of breed. But I think it's a conversation we had a couple of months ago, and maybe it was at RSAC Conference, we're good enough.
[00:12:59] Sean Martin: Right?
[00:13:00] Michael Parisi: If it's a tried and trusted old school brand that has the capabilities that are good enough, may not be sexy, it may not be an AI platform,
[00:13:10] Sean Martin: but configured properly.
[00:13:11] Michael Parisi: But configured appropriately, it works. And I think we're going to see what happened in cloud 10 years ago, consolidation relative to hyperscalers. I mean, really we only have three major players. You can argue five, right? You want to put Cloudflare in there, for example. There's really only three. I think we're going to start seeing that from a cybersecurity tool perspective, and also a GRC perspective. I mean, there are 48 main GRC providers. Give me a break, right? I think within five years that's going to be down to five.
[00:13:47] Sean Martin: Yeah. And I mean, each environment's different. We talk about this, different maturity levels, different objectives.
[00:13:56] Michael Parisi: Snowflake.
[00:13:57] Sean Martin: Everything's a snowflake. Everything's a snowflake. But there are some, and this is probably where the VARs even come in more appropriately than the SIs. For the larger organization, but the small and medium, they struggle with the same thing, and they have fewer resources and less ability to really get their hands around all of this stuff. So I think you might need a few GRCs for that space. But it doesn't matter if it's not configured appropriately and integrated into the business to achieve the outcomes.
[00:14:27] Michael Parisi: Yeah, that's right. And you know, that's one of the reasons why we love partnering with VARs, because they obviously have all the SKUs. And they come to us and say, you tell us what they need. What do they need to buy? And then we help facilitate the function. So that's why it's such a great partnership for us.
[00:14:48] Sean Martin: I love it. Well, let's close with this. Maybe a word to the CISOs that follow this. You get to talk to a lot of them. Maybe a word to them of what you see coming that maybe they should start thinking about now as they put their next budget cycle together.
[00:15:09] Michael Parisi: I mean, I would hope that most of them are thinking about it. What I think the most important thing is, go to your anchor partners that you have. Again, whether that's a VAR, whether that's a trusted advisory relationship, go to your anchor partners to source information around what does the future of the stack and the budget look like, as opposed to trying to talk to everybody. So bring it closer to the chest, right? Go to those trusted people and say, what are you doing next year? Or what's worked for you this year? Because there's just too many vendors, right? And everyone's going to promise you the world, and the reality is they're not delivering on that. So go to your trusted partners. Go back to the well.
[00:15:55] Sean Martin: Yeah.
[00:15:56] Michael Parisi: That's what I think a lot of CISOs are really starting to do.
[00:15:59] Sean Martin: I'm going to add something that I've heard your co-founder Jason Ford say. Because there's one thing about collecting information. He says, have an open mind.
[00:16:11] Michael Parisi: Yes. Have an open mind.
[00:16:12] Sean Martin: I love that.
[00:16:13] Michael Parisi: That's right.
[00:16:14] Sean Martin: Because it's easy to get so buried in what we're working on that if you forget to have an open mind, when you're asked the question, have you considered, it's a very different conversation.
[00:16:24] Michael Parisi: Yes, it is.
[00:16:25] Sean Martin: You have an open mind and you listen to what others are saying. You're not just taking in info.
[00:16:31] Michael Parisi: That's right.
[00:16:32] Sean Martin: Mike, it's always good to chat with my friend.
[00:16:34] Michael Parisi: Hey, you too, man. Good seeing you, as always.
[00:16:35] Sean Martin: And connect with Mike on LinkedIn. The Steel Patriot Partners team are doing all kinds of cool stuff, obviously setting up some new partnerships. So if you have a solution that needs some engineering and integration support, these are your guys.
[00:16:51] Michael Parisi: More to come.
[00:16:52] Sean Martin: More to come. All right. Thanks, everybody.
[00:16:56] Michael Parisi: Thank you.