In October Cloudflare had Birthday Week where they introduced over 30 new products and upgrades. I recommend that you read Software Stack Investing’s amazingly good summary Cloudflare Birthday Week Recap - Software Stack Investing. And a big thanks to Peter Offringer who put the report together!
Saul
89 Likes
I was sick for the last five days and didn’t have a chance to write more, but I’m enclosing an excerpt below which is maybe ne twentieth of the entire article. Click through on the link in my original post above and read the whole thing, and I would suggest that you strongly consider subscribing.
Saul
"Going back to Birthday Week of 2021, the founders made the comment that Cloudflare’s pace of product development was accelerating.
Well, they weren’t exaggerating. Birthday Week 2022 packed in 36 separate product announcements, with 12 on Tuesday alone. As I mentioned during my GA Week coverage, it was refreshing to see that most of the product announcements from the last 12 months have been brought to market. This gives investors confidence that Cloudflare isn’t just innovating by press release, but is delivering value-add services to customers. As an example, R2 and Web-RTC were both introduced during Birthday Week 2021, and are now in GA.
As I reflect on Birthday Week 2022, what strikes me is the growing awareness and influence of Cloudflare within the sphere of Internet services. Several years ago, the company arguably was little known outside of technologist circles. Now, they are able to assemble 26 (and growing) of the top software infrastructure VC’s to commit $1.25B [at $50 million each], to fund start-ups that build new technologies on the Workers platform.
And it’s that rapid growth in Cloudflare’s reach and influence that makes me optimistic about their future. While they are far from hyperscaler status, they are being included in the list of leading providers across a wide array of product categories. Cloudflare is referenced in Zero Trust, network security, serverless compute, application protection, data storage and even video streaming. As they iterate to best-of-breed product status in these categories, I think this reach will only increase.
This momentum will continue to attract the attention of large enterprises, who are looking to consolidate multiple services onto a single platform. As I will discuss, Cloudflare’s architectural approach of owning their data centers and operating their own network will provide unique advantages in pricing and performance that could be disruptive to existing providers. We are already seeing hints of this coming out of GA Week, with R2 lacking egress fees and Stream Live supporting any video resolution for the same price. Layer onto this the enhanced security insights gained from all the core infrastructure services powering millions of web sites, and Cloudflare is creating significant competitive advantage."
48 Likes
It’s not uncommon for Cloudflare management to engage with Muji and Peter Offringa. I’ll just point to one of the comments left by Cloudflare’s CTO after Peter’s article a few weeks ago.
Peter had written
Gartner’s last magic quadrant for SSE (Zero Trust category), Cloudflare was named an Honorable Mention. They were not included because their CASB solution didn’t support an API interface before the cut-off for evaluation. At this point, it does. I think it will be interesting to see if Cloudflare starts to iterate through the magic quadrants for Zero Trust solutions and eventually lands in the Leaders quadrant (perhaps mirroring the trajectory that Datadog took with APM).
In response to the above:
John Graham-Cumming, CTO Cloudflare (responded to Peter in the comments section after the article on SSI)
September 28, 2022 at 6:37 am
PeterO-
“I think it will be interesting to see if Cloudflare starts to iterate through the magic quadrants for Zero Trust solutions and eventually lands in the Leaders quadrant […].”
J G-C-
There is no “if”.
61 Likes