Cloudflare Channel Chief On New SASE Expansion Push With Partners

The company is introducing ‘substantial’ discounts for SASE and application services bundles as a way to increase profitability and simplify deployment for partners, Chief Partner Officer Tom Evans tells CRN.

Cloudflare is introducing new bundled packages for SASE (secure access service edge) and application services as a way to increase profitability and simplify deployment for partners, Cloudflare Chief Partner Officer Tom Evans told CRN.

In an exclusive interview with CRN, Evans said that the new bundles come with “substantial” discounts for partners as a way to offer a major profitability boost and incentivize deploying the full suite of SASE components. Key components of the Cloudflare One SASE platform include zero-trust network access, SD-WAN (Magic WAN) and Firewall as a Service (Magic Firewall).

While selling each component of the platform individually will still be offered, the bundled approach will “allow the partners to make it really simple for customers and take out a lot of the friction,” Evans said. Ultimately, “we can show customers the value of leveraging all of [these components] together with SASE.”

The move comes after a massive shift in sales strategy at Cloudflare that has sought to emphasize solution and service provider partners in a far bigger way, Evans has told CRN previously.

In a sign of Cloudflare’s increased focus on partners, the company also disclosed Monday that its channel-driven revenue surged 70 percent during the second quarter from the same period a year earlier.

The launch of the new incentives for partners Monday comes in connection with Cloudflare’s Connect 2025 event, taking place this week in Las Vegas. Other announcements include the introduction of native availability for Cloudflare’s platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure globally.

What follows is more of CRN’s interview with Evans.

What prompted the launch of these new bundles for your key offerings?

We found that as businesses are facing the growing complexity of their applications and AI workloads, partners need to be a big part of [helping] that. We needed to provide partners with a unified approach, and the bundles really empower them to do that. It’s going to provide them with a way to tailor the security and performance for their customers, and it’s going to package it in a couple ways. One, it’s going to be across the internal systems and external systems. We’ve broken it out where our internal bundles are really for our SASE services—zero trust, Magic WAN, Magic Firewall. And then our external bundles are for application services—the solutions around WAF, CDN, DDoS protection, rate limiting. These bundled discounts are going to allow the partners to make it really simple for customers and take out a lot of the friction of trying to get customers to understand what they’re selling. This is versus the a la carte [approach], which they can still do. But we’re very confident that these bundles will allow them to understand exactly how to go to customers with the right solution.

Is a major focus here trying to enable selling the full SASE platform as opposed to single components of it?

It’s a way for us to provide partners with access to all of the solutions. It’s for simplification, it’s for [reducing] cost, it’s for ease of use. We can show customers the value of leveraging all of [these components] together with SASE. It just makes it a lot easier. In the past [after deploying one component] we’d have additional conversations down the road on potentially expanding into some of these other solutions which they realized they needed. This allows us to have that conversation up front. Or at the very least, it allows the customer to understand it, and then they have it at their fingertips when they’re ready to leverage it. [We’re aiming to] really make it easy for partners to support their customers with those solutions.

Are you introducing new or increased discounts for deploying multiple components of the SASE platform as a bundle?

We’re now [offering] substantial discounts for the bundles to make it cost-effective. Those bundled discounts will range for partners depending on the tier they are with us, how committed they are with us, and the bundles that they’re selling. But really, we’re trying to do this to be much more efficient and flexible. We’re listening to customers. We’re listening to partners. We [want to] create more efficiency and flexibility but also increase their profitability by having these bundled discounts.

Would you say this is enabling a realization of the SASE vision that Cloudflare has had of delivering a full platform to partners and customers?

Absolutely. And customers are definitely consolidating who they’re spending money with. These bundles allow us to provide multiple solutions to customers and allows them to consolidate a lot of the different solutions. Partners like that because it becomes much more sticky for their customers with them.

During 2025, what have you seen as the major differentiators for Cloudflare’s SASE that have been resonating in the market?

It’s really based on the unique opportunity [for partners] to guide their customers through our connectivity cloud. We’re the only company right now that’s offering all of our app services and our network services and our SASE services on our own network, through a single platform. The adoption of AI is really sort of helping us grow faster, and it’s allowing customers to grow faster than they can even sort of handle and manage. Our partners now have that unique opportunity to leverage our network to guide those customers.