“You can’t do smaller-scale licensing deals and expect to be profitable in the long run”: Cloudflare’s Suchanda Mandal

Indian partners need to move beyond fulfilment, build end-to-end technical capabilities and take greater ownership of customer relationships as it scales its partner business in the country.

Cloudflare wants Indian partners to move beyond smaller licensing transactions and fulfilment work, with Suchanda Mandal, VP Partnerships, APAC at Cloudflare, arguing that long-term partner profitability will depend on building the capability to manage customers end to end. The shift comes as Cloudflare builds the foundation for a larger partner business in India.

Mandal says the company is looking for partners that can bring business to Cloudflare, position its platform, manage deployments and support customers without heavy dependence on Cloudflare's own teams.

“We want partners to be a true extension of us in the field,” Mandal says.

The change reflects how Cloudflare works with partners. When the company started building its ecosystem, sellers were approaching customers and bringing partners in for fulfilment and services. That model is now changing, with more partners bringing business to Cloudflare themselves.

“We are seeing a lot more traction in partners bringing business to us, and it is a natural transition,” she says.

Mandal says the objective is for partners to eventually go to customers, position Cloudflare, bring in the business, deliver the work and manage the relationship.

For partners looking to build a deeper relationship with Cloudflare, Mandal says [strategic alignment] is the first requirement.

“We want partners who want to work with us in a very strategic way, where we are jointly building a story for the future,” she says.

That also means investing in technical expertise. Cloudflare is looking for partners willing to build capabilities across the customer lifecycle, from pre-sales through post-sales, rather than limiting their role to selling licences.

“There are a lot of partners who play in this space, but we want someone who is willing to go all in, all the way from pre-sales to post-sales,” Mandal says.

The expectation is driven by how enterprise customers are buying technology. Mandal says customers are no longer looking for a point solution. They want partners to manage the platform, stay current with new capabilities and help manage the technology transition.

For partners, that requires a deeper relationship with the customer.

“For me, earning the trust of the customer - that is a partnership,” she says. “You can only do that when you manage the platform, manage the transition, know the architecture, and earn the trust of the cloud-based seller as well.”

Cloudflare is also looking at the breadth of a partner's presence in India. Mandal says the company wants to work with partners that have pan-India reach as well as regional partners with strong local market penetration.

That regional coverage will matter as Cloudflare expands beyond the largest technology markets.

India strategy moves beyond the big AI cities

Mandal says Cloudflare is not limiting its partner strategy to the Indian cities attracting large AI infrastructure investments.

The company wants partners closer to customers, rather than simply closer to physical data centres.

Her strategy is to build regional coverage across the North, East, West and South, supported by distributors with pan-India reach. The objective is to bring Cloudflare's network and platform, including AI Gateway and Workers, closer to customers.

“The business moving to what we call potentially Tier 2 or extended cities in India is showing that the demand is coming,” she says.

Mandal sees financial services, retail, public sector, healthcare and manufacturing as areas where Cloudflare is seeing demand, particularly where the move to AI is creating greater urgency.

That demand also creates an opportunity for partners to take on more responsibility.

Customers are asking how they should transition to AI, whether new workloads should run alongside existing platforms and how that transition should happen in stages. Mandal says partners will need to help customers manage those decisions rather than simply implement technology.

“That’s why the whole managed services play also becomes very important,” she says. “Partners need to not just implement, but they need to be state of the art in managing the transition for customers.”

Mid-sized resellers and MSPs have a route in

Cloudflare is also opening its partner model to a broader set of Indian resellers and managed service providers.

Mandal says partners can enter through the company's partner programme, which provides dedicated tracks for resellers, managed service providers and self-service agencies.

Cloudflare is also moving towards a model where distributors can onboard some of these partners and bring greater scale into the market.

But simply joining the programme will not be enough.

Mandal says quick enablement is a basic requirement for partners that want to succeed. They need to understand how Cloudflare can be positioned, where its products fit, who can position them and whether they have the right engineering, pre-sales and post-sales capabilities.

The key question is whether a partner can deliver complex work end to end.

“If they are there and willing to do that, we have seen success with some of these players as well,” she says.

Cloudflare, she adds, is prepared to support and groom such partners through enablement and the expertise required to build those capabilities.

“Definitely, I would say scale with specialisation will help them to succeed,” Mandal says.

Design partners remain deliberately selective

The broader push to expand the ecosystem does not mean Cloudflare is opening every programme to every partner immediately.

When Cloudflare launched its Design Partner programme globally this year, it deliberately started with a small number of partners. In India, Softcell is currently the sole Design Partner.

Mandal says the programme was [intended as a pilot] with partners that already had the technical expertise, understood Cloudflare's offerings and had worked with the company on larger customer engagements.

The programme also gives Cloudflare a mechanism to get direct feedback from partners on its products and services, including gaps that need to be addressed and capabilities that could be scaled.

The company has intentionally selected only a handful of partners based on their maturity and goals.

But Mandal says that will change as the business grows.

“We are looking to expand our partner base significantly,” she says. “We are building the foundation for our partner business in India as we speak.”

Cloudflare is already training and building business with more partners globally, while Mandal says her objective is to ramp up the partner business in India significantly.

“India is a high-growth market, needless to say, and we have not tapped the extent to which we can grow,” she says.

Partner autonomy becomes the real test

For Mandal, revenue will remain an important measure of whether the strategy is working, but it is not the only one.

She wants more of Cloudflare's India business to be driven through partners, both through business Cloudflare gives to partners and opportunities that partners bring to Cloudflare.

If she sees at least 15 percent year-on-year growth in the partner business over the next year, she will consider that a strong indicator of progress.

But she also wants to see larger customer wins and greater adoption of Cloudflare's broader platform.

That means partners selling beyond individual point solutions and bringing together Cloudflare One, AI security and other capabilities to build end-to-end platforms for enterprise customers.

Customer retention will be another measure. Mandal wants partners to continue nurturing customers, fulfilling their needs and developing those relationships after the initial deal.

The final measure, however, is autonomy.

“If we have enough partners who can deliver Cloudflare to our customers without our internal teams being heavily involved, wonderful,” she says. “To me, that’s a great sign of a partner success.”

That is the end state behind Cloudflare's push to move partners beyond fulfilment.

Mandal says partners should eventually be able to deploy Cloudflare independently, learn from those deployments and feed that experience back into the company.

“When their engineers are capable of autonomous deployment, they depend less and less on Cloudflare to handhold a deal,” she says.

“Then it becomes a true partner ecosystem, which is scaling, which is growing, which is developing.”

For Indian partners, that makes the opportunity bigger, but also raises the bar. Cloudflare is not simply looking for more partners to transact its products. It wants partners with the technical depth, customer access and services capability to build and manage the business themselves.