With the debut of the Cloudflare One Design Partner Designation, the vendor has sought to ‘pick a set of partners and really go all-in with them’ on driving SASE and AI security, Chief Partner Officer Tom Evans tells CRN exclusively.
Cloudflare announced a major new channel initiative Wednesday targeted at working closely with key partners around fast-growing opportunities, such as enabling secure AI adoption and SASE (secure access service edge) deployments, Chief Partner Officer Tom Evans told CRN exclusively.
The new Cloudflare One Design Partner Designation is aimed at providing a select group of partners with a deeper level of technical expertise and enablement needed to accelerate the implementation of SASE services and AI security controls, Evans (pictured) said.
[Related: Cloudflare Channel Chief On New SASE Expansion Push With Partners]
“This is really our biggest commitment yet on how we co-invest with these partners,” he said.
Initial partners taking part in the initiative are Arctiq, Consortium, CMT, Presidio and The Missing Link, according to Cloudflare.
Rather than starting with a broad set of solution and service providers for the initiative, Cloudflare has been looking to “pick a set of partners and really go all-in with them,” Evans said. “One of the things that we’re now very much focused on is, how do we go even deeper [with select partners] into that realm?”
Along with expanded technical enablement focused on the Cloudflare One suite of SASE services, the new partner designation will provide participating partners with incentives—including funded headcount and MDF—as well as greater access to Cloudflare’s product roadmap, he said.
Overall, when it comes to SASE and AI security right now, “we believe there’s a huge opportunity within our partner community,” Evans said. “We’re seeing a lot of deals start with Cloudflare One—or start with AI and then transition to Cloudflare One. Partners are going to play an immense role in this.”
The expectation is that the Design Partner Designation will be expanded to a broader group of partners over time, though it will remain selective, he noted.
A core part of the initiative is the debut of a new framework, the Cloudflare One Stack, which enables participating partners with a repository of AI skills for improved automation around the Cloudflare One SASE platform, according to the company.
The AI skills can be utilized for rapid evaluation, deployment and management of Cloudflare One, the company said.
Partner Perspective
As one of the inaugural partners on the initiative, Presidio is expecting to further accelerate its business with Cloudflare—which has already been driving significant growth over the past two years, according to Presidio’s Jim Finn.
The new Cloudflare One design partner program aligns closely with evolving customer needs, particularly as widespread AI adoption creates massive challenges around security and governance, said Finn, vice president for cybersecurity sales at New York-based Presidio, No. 26 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2026.
At the same time, many customers are also continuing to struggle with implementing SASE because “they have [too many] disparate solutions within their environment,” he said.
AI has only made the need for platform consolidation more urgent, Finn noted. Many customers are desperate to understand who is using AI tools and what data is being inputted into models—as well as how much they are spending on tokens for AI usage and what controls are in place, he said.
Whether it’s SASE, unsanctioned “shadow AI” or AI data governance, “they can feel like different things. But it all comes down to access,” Finn said. “It comes down to [employees] on their laptops, what they’re accessing and what they’re using to access it. That’s really where Cloudflare can collapse all of that.”
Crucially, in the two years since executive leadership including Evans joined Cloudflare, the company’s channel strategy has stood out from those of many other industry vendors because the company has delivered on its commitments to partners, he said.
Many vendors promise to become more partner-friendly but later fail to follow through, Finn said.
By contrast, “it has been night and day with Cloudflare,” he said. “What we heard two years ago [is exactly] what we have experienced.”
