Cloudflare’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) have seen great progress over the past few years and the future looks even brighter. I joined as Head of EMEA Sales, taking responsibility for our customer-facing activity across the region, just over a year ago. I am encouraged by what we are building while being even more motivated by what lies ahead for our customers, our partners and our employees.
Cloudflare has a rich history in EMEA where London was one of the earliest bases for both the company’s engineering and also its customer-facing activities. In the subsequent years, we have expanded our customer-facing activity to include coverage into all the major EMEA countries and regions. We’ve built up a team of professional sales and business development people, capable systems engineers, dedicated customer success managers, thoughtful marketeers and a responsive customer support team who serve our existing customers and develop new ones as a committed and focused team.
We work on developing brand awareness for Cloudflare and extending our reach into the market through communications, events and most of all through ongoing close engagement with customers, prospective customers and partners. We carry the Cloudflare mission of helping build a better Internet to the market and reinforce it every chance we get.
A short word about myself
I’m a British-Canadian with more than 25 years experience growing international businesses, mostly in the Internet area with leading companies such as Cisco. I speak a little French and Japanese as a result of my travels and have a great appreciation for the rich cultures and incredible diversity that we have in the EMEA region. I see opportunity throughout EMEA and am excited to apply what I’ve learned to help Cloudflare expand and serve our customers here.
Looking into the region
EMEA is a vast, diverse region encompassing approximately 120 countries across 3 continents with a huge variety of cultures, languages and backgrounds of its people. From large, influential countries like Germany, the United Kingdom and France to dynamic, innovative countries such as Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands to fast-growing, emerging countries like Poland, the United Arab Emirates and South Africa there is a tremendous breadth of opportunity and demand for Cloudflare in these attractive and diverse markets.
Our customers
Our customers in EMEA are some of the most innovative and advanced in the world. Building on Cloudflare’s usual strengths around securing and making more performant our customers’ websites and digital assets, we are increasingly having new conversations with customers in their key areas of their innovation. For example, many companies in EMEA are at the forefront of the trend towards serverless computing and Cloudflare is enabling them on that path with Cloudflare Workers.
Another area of focus is corporate security including identity and access management where Cloudflare Access is being deployed by a number of forward-looking organisations. Customers using additional network protocols such as UDP in the gaming industry and TCP in financial trading markets are leveraging Cloudflare’s Spectrum capability for enhanced security and network traffic handling. This exciting progress is leading our customers to enjoy increasing breadth of usage and strategic value from Cloudflare’s solutions.
On the security and privacy front, in the European market in particular, there is a strong focus on data privacy and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations). Cloudflare is closely engaged with policymakers at the European Union in Brussels to align with and influence these important policy developments.
Our customers continue to be from digital, online, born on the web/cloud sectors while increasingly we are also adding customers from more traditional corporate, and in many cases global, environments where Cloud-based services are seeing rapid adoption as these customers go through digital transformation. Multi-cloud is also an important theme in particular with larger customers who are diversifying away from a single Cloud provider. Cloudflare is well placed to serve customer needs around all these trends.
Here are a few of our exciting EMEA customer stories:
Our Cloudflare customer facing team in EMEA
London continues to be the base camp for our activities where we have a customer facing the team of approximately 100 people carrying out our activities supporting and developing customers. We have over 20 nationalities represented on the team and 29 and counting languages covered. It’s a diverse and committed team that is well aligned to the broad, diverse markets we serve. We represent a significant portion of Cloudflare’s business globally and are growing fast.
We’ve recently moved to a large new office space in a great location at London County Hall. In fact, we can see a number of our important customers in the UK public sector and corporate sector from our new office. We celebrated this new office opening with an event in April where our co-founders CEO Matthew Prince and COO Michelle Zatlyn both made the journey from San Francisco to co-host. This new modern office space is well set up to receive existing and prospective customers as well as other key parties such as partners and developers in a professional and comfortable environment conveniently located in central London.
Alongside our customer-facing team in London is, of course, a significant portion of our global engineering team which is led by our CTO John Graham-Cumming. So, our customers and our employees benefit by having all elements of Cloudflare’s business from engineering to product management to all customers facing activities under one roof.
In 2018 we’ve added a second important customer-facing base in Munich, Germany to serve the Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (DACH) markets under the leadership of Stefan Henke. Our DACH team has been growing rapidly, approaching 20 people to support an exciting rate of new customer growth in the region.
Our Partners
We work with a number of committed channel partners throughout the region and are working to extend that cooperation while developing new partners such that we can best serve Cloudflare customers throughout the region. We’ve appointed a Head of EMEA Channel partnerships, Anwar Karzazi, who leads our team and activities building these partnerships in the region.
Our Network
The Cloudflare network is powered by data centers in over 180 cities around the world including 70+ in EMEA. With our strong coverage In most parts of EMEA, we are typically able to process requests of our customers web site traffic very rapidly ensuring a great experience for their customers and visitors.
Key milestone
Our annual London Connect customer event is happening today at our County Hall location. The event brings together our customers, prospective customers, partners, developers and other interested parties for a full day of information exchange and presentations focusing on the success our customers are having with Cloudflare solutions. If you are already planning to attend, keep an eye on our Twitter account for schedule updates!
We’re recruiting
If you’re interested in exploring your career at Cloudflare, we are hiring in Europe and globally! Our team in London and in Munich is looking to expand across the region for roles including Account Executives, Business Development Representatives, Customer Success Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Support, Network Engineering, Systems Reliability Engineering, Sales Operations and also in Product Development/Engineering and more. Check out our careers page to learn more!
Final words
I’m looking forward to helping Cloudflare grow substantially in EMEA in the coming years!
Thanks to everyone within Cloudflare who is helping us to build up a great EMEA business with the aim of serving our growing base of EMEA and global customers exceptionally well.
If you are a Cloudflare customer in EMEA reading this, thank you and expect our continued innovation and commitment to you and your organisation. Thinking about becoming a customer? We’d love to have you with us. Our EMEA team looks forward to serving you and extending the value we bring to you in the future.