Sorry for this short post. I have a more detailed write-up on NET but not ready to post yet.
I feel Cloudfare (NET) is doing a great job and is a winner! OKTA has been one of my favorite companies and investments since 2017. It also has the highest allocation in my portfolio of 6 stocks currently. After OKTA, NET is the other stock that I felt really excited about and quickly built up a 10% position after it’s IPO and the recent dip.
When you put the following testimony from Shopify and the CTO’s twit in context, you get a perspective of what NET is doing.
“Black Friday is one of the most important days for our merchants every year, and 2019 was the biggest of them all, with consumers around the world shopping more than ever. With the support of Cloudflare, we were able to handle the demand during this shopping season and deliver lightning-fast responses to shoppers globally." — Charles Ng Production Engineering Manager, Shopify
…AND THIS twit from Jean-Michel Lemieux, CTO Shopify
"As we help thousands of businesses to move online, our platform is now handling Black Friday level traffic every day! It won’t be long before traffic has doubled or more. Our merchants aren’t stopping, neither are we. We need to scale our platform."
Thanks Ron.
Looking forward to your more detail insight into NET.
I really like they are firing on multiple cylinders and have been building position slowly.
Of all the freemium software models they have the most interesting because the excess capacity they give away for free is simultaneously the required safety net for their customers.
Reminds me of how AWS rose out of the excess resources of Amazon retail sorta.
In this SaaS world, it not surprising to see how some of our stocks have relationships with one another…
As we have seen how ZM scaled so well without any hiccups during it’s sudden and massive spike of usage. And the internet ( which has been the backbone during this crisis) has been holding up so well.
Kentik, is a network analytics provider based in San Francisco and I believe ZM uses their services for network visibility.
Kentik and Cloudfare (NET) have recently partnered to make the internet a better place…
“The collaboration integrates network traffic intelligence from Kentik with Cloudflare Magic Transit for fast mitigation of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.”
So there you go… a relation among ZM, Kentik and NET ( Cloudfare).
“In this SaaS world, it not surprising to see how some of our stocks have relationships with one another…“
Given how concentrated many of portfolios are, I would rather that our companies not be in business together to avoid business concentration risk. Even the best company can have an unexpected blow up. I’d rather be diversified away from such risks to the extent possible.
As we have seen how ZM scaled so well without any hiccups during it’s sudden and massive spike of usage.
I would call Zoom’s inadvertent routing of traffic to new Chinese servers at least a hiccup.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said the problem stemmed from how it quickly added server capacity to support its huge influx of new users. … Yuan said Zoom first added servers in China, where the outbreak began.
So, it was a bit surprising when, a few weeks ago, Zoom decided to use (switch-to or add is unclear) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for its cloud infrastructure. OCI is, at best, the 4th player in public clouds (see Gartner’s 2019 report here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-named-as-a-leader-in-ga… )
So, was it better pricing? Oracle has got to be hungry to sign new deals, especially ones where a press release would get so much attention due to Zoom. On Zoom’s side, I think that Oracle’s focus on security was attractive, given all the challenges that Zoom faces. You can configure AWS to be secure, but OCI provides more defaults and is set up for enterprises that naturally have a security conscious focus, whereas AWS is more able flexibility (which is why start-ups love it).
And the internet ( which has been the backbone during this crisis) has been holding up so well.