Cloudfare, enriched by the Area 1 acquisition, is rolling out a new initiative: the Cloudfare One Partner Program.
The new launch comes approximately six months after Cloudflare, one of the internet's largest networks, updated the Channel and Alliances Partner Program to support secure access service edge and zero-trust managed services. Cloudflare One now elevates all existing products and partners, with a special emphasis on zero trust.
“We’re pulling together the different parts of our bundle to make sure we have the right pricing and incentive structure,” Matt Harrell, global head of channels and alliances at Cloudflare, told Channel Futures.
The bundle has zero trust, network as a service and a cloud email security, all delivered via software as a service.
“We’re making a big investment in zero trust,” Harrell said.
“Organizations need a unified solution to secure their distributed workforces and, at the same time, accelerate employee systems,” Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare said.
“Organizations need a unified solution to secure their distributed workforces and, at the same time, accelerate employee systems,” Prince said. “But another key piece is broad adoption, and that’s why we’ve been working to seamlessly layer this into organizations without interruptions. Critical architectures like zero trust shouldn’t be complex, yet we hear every day from businesses that don’t know where to start. That’s why we have modernized how partners can fully implement and deliver what organizations of all sizes need most today,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, agreed.
With this in mind, Cloudflare is investing heavily in partners – managed service providers, resellers, technology solutions brokerages, and system integrators – through Cloudflare One. Here's how it works: Partners can join the Essentials, Advanced, or Premier tiers. Each is delivered on a per-user basis, with pricing based on the number of users.
However, the higher a partner goes, the more access to capabilities and the potential for return on investment. Premier, of course, is the highest level and includes all Cloudflare solutions and features. Furthermore, the Premier tier has the highest potential for compensation — up to 45 percent total margin after base discounts, deal registration, bundled sales, and the partner's own professional services.
To that end, Cloudflare is actively encouraging its partners to serve as the service delivery component for its platforms.
“We’re not competing with our channel on the services side,” Harrell said. “We don’t want to offers services. We have basic-level, quick-start packages, but they’re designed to be advisory. … We’re not in the game of wanting to build out a professional services organization or do massive migrations.”
“We understand that some partners are going to want to engage directly and purchase directly through Cloudflare, and we will enable that,” Harrel said. However, he added, “initial deployment will be through TD Synnex. They’re very good at bundling and pricing, making it easier for partners to consume.”