It can be hard for outsiders to grasp the sheer breadth of Cloudflare’s offering, as Co-Founder, President and COO Michelle Zatlyn admits. But there are sound strategic reasons for the company’s decision to cover so many bases.
Having launched 14 years ago as a cybersecurity company, Cloudfare now positions itself as “the world’s first connectivity cloud”, a unified platform encompassing networking, security, and developer services, making it well-positioned to support companies in navigating the next 20 years of the internet while balancing evolving technology priorities.
Seamlessness is the secret
Cloud-based platforms are the solution, according to Zatlyn. She puts part of Cloudflare’s success down to its growth as an internet-native platform, with none of the technical debt of its antecedents.
“We haven't grown through acquisition, so we don't need to integrate all of these bespoke businesses – that's really hard in the cloud-based service,” she explains.
Single-source cloud connectivity avoids multiple costs, she adds: “These platforms have to be integrated and solve a lot of problems for their customers. It doesn’t make sense if you’ve got to stack all of these cloud costs on top of each other.
“We really want one seamless experience for cloud – we think that is the killer secret sauce of what we do.”
The efficiency of triggering multiple applications through a single request is also good for the planet: “There's an amazing sustainability story too. We really do help save a lot of power and energy by using a service like Cloudflare.”
“We really want one seamless experience for cloud – we think that is the killer secret sauce of what we do.”
Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder, President and COO, Cloudflare
New leaders drive growth effort
It’s a strategy that seems to be working. Zatlyn spoke to the conference shortly after announcing Q3 results showing a 28% increase in year-on-year revenues. It also passed a new milestone, with 35% of Fortune 500 companies now Cloudflare customers.
Now the business is moving into a new level of growth, with ambitions to push revenue from $1bn to $5bn. “The next seven years is about building a world-class go-to-market machine,” Zatlyn says.
To that end, the business recently signed up a clutch of senior leaders, including Mark Anderson, formerly CEO at Alteryx, and industry veteran CJ Desai. “These people can all work anywhere, and they chose Cloudflare,” Zatlyn notes.
She sees growth potential in the common needs that Cloudflare can address across all sizes of organization and multiple territories. “We have so many amazing customers today, but most of the world doesn't use us or they don't know about us yet,” she says.
Deflecting AI risks, capturing its benefits
Zatlyn classes the rise of generative AI alongside the inventions of electricity and the internet in terms of its potential impact – and she sees it as a tailwind for her business.
In part, Cloudflare will benefit by working to scotch the risks. “Bad guys are definitely taking advantage of AI to launch more scary cyber threats,” Zatlyn says. “But the good news is, is the industry is in a position, because of cloud computing, to respond really quickly.”
But the company is also supporting clients to reap the positive benefits of AI, through facilitating inference – the process by which AI models produce predictions or conclusions.
“We now run GPUs at the edge of the internet, so we do let our customers do inference there,” Zatlyn explains. “We're seeing a lot of experimentation by companies who are saying, now I have security, performance and a new place to inference: what can I build with that?”
“Bad guys are definitely taking advantage of AI to launch more scary cyber threats, but because of cloud computing, the industry is in a position to respond really quickly.”
Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder, President and COO, Cloudflare
The future is serverless
Innovative companies are avoiding conventional digital infrastructure, opting to build their new applications using Cloudflare’s ‘serverless’ environment, known as Workers.
While major organizations have yet to adopt this way of working, many start-ups funded through the Y Combinator accelerator are now using Workers, Zatlyn notes to McKay.
That means in future, “those companies that end up being winners will already be running code on our network,” she adds. “That really changes the calculus when you think about M&A. I don't think that point is well understood by the market or investors.”