Cloudflare Channel Chief On ‘Maximizing’ Partner-Focused Growth Strategy

Chief Partner Officer Tom Evans tells CRN that the company is in the midst of a major shift that seeks to ‘turn on the partner ecosystem’ to accelerate growth in SASE and developer services.

A massive shift in sales strategy is underway at Cloudflare that seeks to emphasize solution and service provider partners, with an aim toward accelerating growth in the vendor’s key areas including secure access service edge (SASE) and developer services, Cloudflare Chief Partner Officer Tom Evans told CRN.

Evans, who was formerly the channel chief at Palo Alto Networks prior to joining Cloudflare in April 2024, said a top goal for this year is to take the next steps needed to “turn on the partner ecosystem.”

[Related: The 20 Coolest Cloud Security Companies Of The 2025 Cloud 100]

With Cloudflare having now moved well beyond its roots of focusing on web content delivery and direct sales, Evans said the efforts to shift to a partner-focused sales strategy have ramped up even further during the nine months since he joined.

“I think most partners are now starting to see that we really are heading in that direction,” he said in a recent interview. “Plus, they're now seeing their revenue start to grow, and they're starting to see us bring them more deals. And they're starting to see our sales team be a lot more open to working with them, versus maybe being a little bit resistant in the past.”

Evans — who reports to Mark Anderson, Cloudflare’s president of revenue and former president of Palo Alto Networks — said that the executive team at Cloudflare is now all-in on working with partners for its next phase of growth. Anderson joined the company a year ago and has hired Evans and other executives to drive the increased emphasis on partners at Cloudflare.

SASE Opportunity

Cloudflare has doubled down in recent years on building out SASE and security service edge (SSE) offerings, which are in high demand as a way to provide secure access to distributed workforces.

Cloudflare reports that its SASE platform — as well as security offerings such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation and web application firewall — leverage the vendor’s global network, which covers 330 cities across more than 120 countries.

Cloudflare has also expanded aggressively into offering cloud-delivered compute, storage and other developer services, in addition to continuing to operate its widely used web content delivery service.

During recent meetings with partners, Evans said he repeatedly heard the same sentiments about the opportunity ahead for partner-driven growth of Cloudflare’s offerings: “‘If you guys really do turn this on, it's going to be a game changer.’”

“I do think everyone internally has recognized that,” he said. “Partners are starting to see that, and now we’ve just got to get the foundation built that allows us to do it. But I'm very confident we will get there quickly.”

What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Evans.

What have been some of your biggest priorities and learnings in the role so far?

I’ve been spending a lot of time getting to know a lot of our sales leaders, because we need them to work with the partners. I think that was our biggest change that we were going to have to overcome. But then also meeting with a ton of partners and just listening on what we can do and to improve.

When I first started, I thought one of my biggest jobs was going to be to travel around and meet with partners and convince them to sell Cloudflare. I found it's not the issue at all. It hasn't been a problem. I've been able to get into every partner that I wanted to see. They're all actually really excited to sell more. The feedback I've gotten is, “We want to do more, and you guys are in a great position. We just need you to be a little bit easier to do business with.” Prior to some of us joining, I think Cloudflare was very successful and didn't necessarily leverage the partner ecosystem in a fully maximized way. I think everyone has kind of realized that if we can maximize the partners, we can scale up to $5 billion and ultimately $10 billion [in ARR]. And if we can get to 90-plus percent of our business through partners, it would scale the way we need it to scale. I was at F5 for a long time. I was at Palo for a long time. And my boss now [Mark Anderson] was at both those companies with me, and I worked for him at both of them. He has a pretty solid blueprint of how to do it. I was the first hire that he called and said, “We’re 100 percent [focused on] partners. Let's do this.”

I’ve hired a fair amount and we're going to continue to hire. One of the things we're doing is going upmarket to the enterprise. On the backend side, I’m also working on fixing some of the operational pieces that were needed. [That includes] our partner portal, and all the things that, if we think of a partner experience, we just need to become better. That was overwhelmingly the feedback partners gave me — if you can just become easier [to work with], we'll actually do a lot more.

And then finally, we're focusing heavily on the services piece. We're now building out, through enablement, new curriculums for our partners to be able to do training and deliver services. We don't want to hire a bunch of services people. Our goal is not to become a services company — it's actually to pull back from the amount of services we're doing and start to give it to partners. In the last five months, we've started giving some of our key partners some really large services opportunities that they're now taking advantage of.

What are the main services based around? Are some of the services based around SASE I would imagine?

A lot of it's around SASE. But it's really just any professional services around installation of all of our solutions. There are some SASE opportunities that we're giving to partners. But we’re also looking for them to do managed services across the entire platform. We’re now asking partners to deliver managed services on our behalf. So it's really some basic professional services to full-on, year-long implementations, to now managed services. And then eventually just getting into the much more complex delivery of our solutions — that’s what we're hoping to do.

What’s the vision for the services expansion?

We're starting to deliver services and provide solutions for more enterprise accounts. Right now, we're in 35 percent of the Fortune 500. And as we start to expand that, all of our solutions come with the ability for someone to deliver services. I think we're heavily focused on the customer satisfaction issue. And as we looked at it [we considered], “Do we want to deliver all these services — from the common installations to the migrations off of some of our competitors?” That's something we're doing heavily right now. [And then] to the long-term, post-sales, resident engineers, consulting — we don't want to do any of that. We have to do it for a certain subset of accounts that force us to. But our goal really is to have partners deliver it.

What we're doing now is building out a full enablement and training curriculum so that a partner who wants to come on board can go through our training, and ultimately build out a services practice. What I'm looking for is those partners that have their own SOC, or have the ability to deliver these services, and want to work with us and get trained — and then ultimately, just take those on so that we can either subcontract to them or partner them with some other partners who don't do services. We're starting to see a lot of our partners do more and more of the services, which is making them now come back and really interested in selling more, because that's how they get sticky with their customers.

Are some of those partners that you had not been working with before, or just had been doing very little, and now you're doing a good amount with them?

It's a combination of, certainly some partners that we were doing some business with, but definitely not enough. It was very opportunistic. But I wouldn't say we were [partnering] in a strategic way — and now we are. We're starting to see some of those large systems integrators, some of the large national partners, and even some of the regional players, along with the service providers — really just leaning in on how they can do more. I think they're realizing, yes, they did some deals with us, but it was very opportunistic. Now it's more, “How do we really scale this thing to grow it?”

We have a fair amount of partners, but a lot of them were doing one deal. That's, to me, not terribly valuable. I would much rather decrease the number of partners that we do those deals with, and have them do a lot more deals. Then there are some partners that were not partners, which we've been able to target and go after. And that would be some of those larger [system integrators], and even some of the larger nationals that we just weren't in. We've had some really good meetings [around] getting into their training centers, and having them build teams around us. We're in discussions with a lot of partners on that now.

Are you able to say who any of the newer ones are?

I'm not yet. We're hoping to, at some point, come out with some really good announcements around some partners. We do have a lot of partners who are very interested and very close to that. I think [this year] we're going to have quite a few announcements of some [new] partners that are just looking for some alternative solutions to what they've been selling.

I think they recognize — with our solution and how successful we've been without leveraging them — their sales team in the field is seeing a really big opportunity for us. But again, we have a lot to do on our end to make it profitable for them. This year, we'll come out with an evolution of our partner program. Over the next 18 months, probably monthly, we'll come out with something new — whether that's our new portal or new rebates or new incentives, new spiff programs, new training. We talked about whether we would just try to do it all together, or just launch it as we go. I firmly believe when we develop something, we should get it out there.

In terms of these opportunities, are a lot of them weighted toward security, or are they a mixture?

I would say a lot of it is definitely toward security, because that seems to be the hottest topic with our partners right now. But my whole team is not separating it out. We're looking at it across, how do we create a partner that is [covering] all of our platform, not just the security products.

Is that an advantage, since not everyone's got the computing offerings and some of the other services?

It’s a huge advantage. Because if you think of the customers, the connectivity cloud that we built is really to go after customers who want to increase their speed, become more reliable, increase their security — across their entire platform. [That means] not just their security products, not just the security solution, but all of their network, compute, storage. Our solutions help them to do that through the connectivity cloud. [That] allows us to say, if we have a partner program that handles all of it, there's advantages for partners to sell all of Cloudflare. What we're trying to get away from is, the customers out there that have gotten used to buying security products as more of a point solution, to get away from that. We're really saying, you have the ability now to look at security and non-security — across the compute, network and storage — to say, how does Cloudflare secure everything? How do we make everything faster? That's where we're really driving toward. And that's what the program will be weighted toward. It's not specific to one market.

To partners, how would you describe Cloudflare’s biggest differentiator at this point?

When I talk to partners, that [platform] is the one thing that they all ask me about. What I tell them is, we're not a point product at all. You're not going to just solve one pain point. What you are going to do is go into your customers and talk about their entire infrastructure — talk about their networking, their compute, their data, their security, their storage — which is a big conversation. And if we can get all those teams talking, we can actually solve everything. Whereas a lot of our competitors go in, and they talk about specific areas of security, or specific areas around infrastructure. We want to have a broad conversation. What I'm noticing is, when we're getting in with partners early and we're having that big conversation, it turns into a big opportunity with some of these customers. Even if we don't get all of it at one time, on the roadmap, what we're hoping for is that, over time, we can help with all of their infrastructure, and not just one piece of it. I came in not necessarily thinking that was the biggest differentiator, but I will say, that's what everyone has been talking about in all my conversations, around the world.

You’re also operating in the hyperscalers’ space in a way that not too many other companies are?

We do present an alternative for customers out there that want that. And having our own network allows us to do a lot of things very quickly. Things that we can deploy in a matter of minutes, other companies may take months or even years to do. We can deploy things in a much quicker way because we have our own network. People ask me all the time about our competitors. We compete in a lot of different ways. Because we have our own network, but we also have our security products, our compute, our CDN product, our DDoS products. [Those] are allowing us to really look at the entire vast infrastructure. That is the differentiator.

But when you look at AWS, for instance, they’re mostly focused on securing AWS.

Right — we’re securing everything. And we're trying to make everything faster. We're in over 330 cities now, and 120 countries. Now 20 percent of the internet is going through Cloudflare — that's a pretty massive amount of just data. That gives us the ability to see a lot of things that we can now speed up and make faster, and then make more secure. It gives us a great differentiator. And if we can now turn on the partner ecosystem, it just opens the door for them to sell a ton more to their customers and to consolidate some of those solutions that they’re selling.

You mentioned the goal is to get to 90 percent of sales through partners — are you able to say what percentage of your sales are through partners right now?

We have a long way to go, but we are growing pretty significantly. We grew revenue going through partners by 174 percent [over the last two fiscal years]. So we're making progress. There are two major things I'm looking at. For partner-attached [sales], we think 90 percent is realistic in the next couple years. And then [there’s] also the partner-initiated business. We're looking for a healthy mix there. We're starting to see our attached business grow. But we're also seeing [growth in] the business partners are bringing to us — which, to me, is showing [increased] trust. They weren't necessarily bringing us deals before — they were worried if we were going to partner with them, if we would stick with them. To our credit, our sales leadership has taken the partner-first mantra to heart, and are now telling their team, “When you're with a partner, we’re not going away from that partner.” And we are going to have a very robust program that's going to be very loyal to them through deal reg and through other things — but also that provide them incentives that they can make a ton of money on. If you’re a sales rep in the field, initially you sort of think, “If the partner's making money, it takes away from mine.” But they're now realizing that our deals are actually getting bigger, the discounts are more favorable to them, and they're just selling a lot more products because partners have that advisor capacity with customers. That's been helpful, because now the sales team is starting to call me and say, “We want bigger deals.” Once we can turn on our program and our operations and our systems to make it easy, then it'll be sort of a machine that we can focus on not just the transactional deals, but also then go after those large enterprise deals.

Are you seeing more partners recognizing the shift in your sales and partnering approach?

I think for the first few months I was here, there was a lot of hesitancy. Several partners that I've worked with for the last 20 years were sort of like, “We’ll believe it when we see it.” But now they're [seeing] that we're continuing to hire very partner-friendly people. We hired a new president of our product team, CJ Desai, who came from ServiceNow. CJ and I have had multiple conversations, and all of it's about partner. And then [President of Revenue] Mark Anderson — obviously, every company that he's ever led has been around partners. I think most partners are now starting to see that we really are heading in that direction. Plus they're now seeing their revenue start to grow, and they're starting to see us bring them more deals. And they're starting to see our sales team be a lot more open to working with them, versus maybe being a little bit resistant in the past. I was with partners [recently] in Las Vegas, and every partner was like, “If you guys really do turn this on, it's going to be a game changer.” And I do think everyone internally has recognized that. Partners are starting to see that, and now we’ve just got to get the foundation built that allows us to do it. But I'm very confident we will get there quickly.