Cloudflare: APAC driving global channel plans

As a leading connectivity cloud company on a mission to help build a better Internet, Cloudflare continues to showcase its strength in the industry. With its content delivery network (CDN) remaining one of the most popular used by organizations around the world, Cloudflare has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Edge Delivery Services 2024 Vendor Assessment.

The success is clearly indicated in the number fourteen Fortune Future 50 company. In 2024, Cloudflare recording a total revenue of US$1,669.6 million, representing an increase of 29% year-over-year.

For Tom Evans, Chief Partner Officer at Cloudflare, while the company’s global revenue is positive, a significant amount of it is contributed from their business in the Asia Pacific region.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Evans stated the Asia Pacific region continues to record significantly positive numbers which are not just contributed by their product but also the role their partners are playing in ensuring the brand remains successful.

“We're seeing our partners really start to embrace the idea of bringing us into more opportunities. When I first started at Cloudflare, we were mostly bringing partners to a lot of deals and they were being very successful with the deals and they were starting to deliver services from the deals,” said Evans.

Evans explained that while the current strategy has been successful, they wanted to pivot to something more. Specifically, Evans is expecting partners to give them more in return for the deals that are brought to them.

“As we started bringing partners into deals, we also decided to start expecting deals in return. And that’s a true partnership, because the only way we can scale is if we get a partner ecosystem. The only way we're going to do that is if we drive business to partners but expect some in return. In APAC, we're doing a really good job of attaching our deals to partners, which is also the highest globally. We're starting to now see the return on partners bringing us deals,” he added.

Pivoting to a new strategy

Evans stated that partners in APAC are also a bit further when it comes to investment and working with Cloudflare as compared to partners from other regions.

“I need to balance it out a little bit. This is a great regional market for us. We still have room to prove and room to grow off, but I do look at our partners in APAC and think they're definitely doing more because we started earlier. And when I talk to them, they're just a little bit further along on the investment and the commitment and wanting to work with us,” said Evans.

As such, when it comes to pivoting into a strategy whereby partners will need to deliver more, Evans mentioned that the partners are also excited with this strategy. However, he acknowledged that there are some partners who are probably a little bit nervous that maybe they won't be picked because they're so comfortable with the previous method of just doing one or two deals a year.

“They were doing a deal because they had a relationship with the customer, making whatever margin they were making. But there was nothing, there was no strategic business plan to it. So, some of them certainly are a little nervous, but the ones that we're talking to regularly love it. They want to be more strategic with us. When I started here, I really thought one of my main jobs was going to be to fly around the world and convince partners to sell us. However, I realized, that's not what I'm running into,” said Evans.

Instead, he feels that partners in APAC, as well as globally, are really interested and are already all in. He added that there’s been no issues with the partners and they’re all eager to see what Cloudflare is doing.

“So here is where I sort of pivoted and said, how do we operationally make it much easier? How do we get pricing in place? How do we get a partner portal in place? How do we become that partner where every day, if they want to do a deal with us, it's just simple? That's what we're heading towards, and we've significantly made that better in the last 10 months. This year will be a real pivotal moment for us to make it an easy operational way to do business with us,” explained Evans.

Partner growth from APAC to the world

With APAC partners influencing Cloudflare’s partner strategy, Evans is aiming to achieve this globally as well in 2025. Given the success in deals being presented to them, Evans also stated that they’re now at a point where they get to decide which partners they can focus on.

“One of the challenges I uncovered is that we either do one deal with a lot of partners or two deals with a lot of partners. We want to limit that and say we want a few partners and do a ton of deals with them. That's how you start to get partners bringing us more and more opportunities,” explained Evans.

The success in the APAC region also signals how the company is planning to approach its global strategy. Evans pointed out that his goal in the next 18 months is to launch a product, be it internally or externally, every month that heads towards an ideal state partner program.

“This can range anything from internally fixing a system that allows our sales reps to easily approve deal registrations, or it can be externally different incentives, backend rebates, MOUs, technical certifications and such. My original intent was to sort of wait and launch it all together in like six months. And I realized we just have so much that every month we potentially come out with something new,” said Evans.

Evan also mentioned that Cloudflare will be coming out with a brand-new partner portal soon.

“The new partner portal is going to really afford our partners access to everything that we have. We're then going to announce more around the enablement and some of the curriculums we're launching that'll all be on the portal,” added Evans.

Getting partners on board

“We are really focused on partners right now not just on the channel side, but on the sales side as well,” explained Evans.

However, Evans also mentioned that there are still some challenges Cloudflare is hoping to solve to smoothen the process for partners. According to Evans, the biggest challenge for partners in dealing with Cloudflare right now is the number of cycles they need to go through to get a deal completed. Apart from that, partners are also challenged to have additional access to technical resources.

“I'm hiring quite a bit of partner account managers, but also on the technical side. Partners just want more access to it. They want more education. They want more enablement. We're now building additional enablement criteria and curriculums and education. We're putting in a certification program on the technical side for both customers and partners. They just want more. Hence, I'm putting a lot of pressure on our team to realize that we have a great opportunity right now,” added Evans.

Moving forward, Evans believes that partners are willing to invest and co-invest with Cloudflare. As such, apart from improving the partner program and education, Evans stated that Cloudflare is also finalizing their strategy for the rest of the year around some strategic partners that they want to go to market with.

“We're going to invest in their business. They're going to invest in ours. We're looking across all routes to the market to do it. We want to launch it for everybody and everything and realize that customers have a choice. And oftentimes on an opportunity, they work with a ton of different partners. I want to foster all of them so that the customer really has a choice on who they're going to work with and whatever route to market they choose,” said Evans.

Evans added that Cloudflare is comfortable and mature enough to be successful as they look to partners to deploy solutions and consume more of it.

“If we look at the renewals, when we've sold multiple solutions, our renewal and our expansion is far greater than the struggle we sometimes must just renew a point product, because our competitors are going in and trying to sell it as well. But oftentimes when we have more than one solution in there, customers are sticky with us, which is great because it limits the churn,” explained Evans.

As such, Evans believes Cloudflare’s message to partners is very clearly indicating that they are absolutely committed to customers and partners.

“My advice is hold us accountable for that. I think partners should come to us and try to become a very strategic partner with us. Get a business plan in place, work with your partner, account manager and work to get into as many accounts as you can. And you'll find that we will absolutely commit the resources to you, be it the incentives, the margin or the programs. If you commit to us, we will commit back to you. I think it's, it's important that there is commitment on both sides,” concluded Evans.