Dive Brief:
- Cloudflare is investing in a select group of channel partners to provide technical guidance for its secure access service edge platform, the company said in an announcement.
- The cloud security vendor will provide training, funding and access to a database of blueprint configurations and automated workflows for deploying its SASE offering to partners eligible for the new Cloudflare One Design designation. Arctiq, Consortium, CMT, Presidio and The Missing Link are among the first to benefit from the program.
- One Design is part of Cloudflare’s ongoing push to use partners for product consulting, implementation and servicing. “This new framework represents our deepest channel co-investment yet,” Cloudflare Chief Partner Officer Tom Evans said in the announcement. “We are equipping our elite partners with the financial runway and technical mastery they want to scale the Cloudflare One platform.”
Dive Insight:
A little over a month since announcing a 20% workforce cut, Cloudflare is banking on partners to fill gaps in sales and customer support. Cloudflare and many of its peers are increasingly backing out of consulting and professional contracts and tossing those deals to partners.
They say it’s what their customers prefer.
“The largest opportunities increasingly involve complex transformations,” President of Revenue Mark Anderson said during the company’s June 9 analyst day. “Customers want strategic guidance. They want implementation support. And they want long-term operational expertise that partners bring. And they have to move fast.”
In order to give designated partners oversight on SASE projects, Cloudflare handed them a library of workflows for configuring architecture. Partners can unleash their workers and AI agents on decision trees, tool definitions and other information inside the library to bypass painful manual provisioning.
“With a foundational repository of agent-ready best practices that remove rigidity and allow us to easily transform complex network migrations into high-value consulting services, we are thrilled to help create the future of enterprise security,” Presidio Sales VP of Cyber Jim Finn said Wednesday in a press release.
The design designation reflects a broader trend in partner recruitment. Companies are picking partners that are committed to building practices around their platforms, rather than trying to boil the ocean.
“Every year we’re going to do a lot more revenue with fewer partners, but we’re increasing our services partners,” Evans told Channel Dive in November.
