Post Syndicated from Matt Lewis original https://blog.cloudflare.com/technology-partner-program/

The Internet is built on a series of shared protocols, all working in harmony to deliver the collective experience that has changed the way we live and work. These open standards have created a platform such that a myriad of companies can build unique services and products that work together seamlessly. As a steward and supporter of an open Internet, we aspire to provide an interoperable platform that works with all the complementary technologies that our customers use across their technology stack. This has been the guiding principle for the multiple partnerships we have launched over the last few years.  

One example is our Bandwidth Alliance — launched in 2018, this alliance with 18 cloud and storage providers aims to reduce egress fees, also known as data transfer fees, for our customers. The Bandwidth Alliance has broken the norms of the cloud industry so that customers can move data more freely. Since then, we have launched several technology partner programs with over 40+ partners, including:

• Analytics — Visualize Cloudflare logs and metrics easily, and help customers better understand events and trends from websites and applications on the Cloudflare network.
• Network Interconnect — Partnerships with best-in-class Interconnection platforms offer private, secure, software-defined links with near instant-turn-up of ports.
• Endpoint Protection Partnerships — With these integrations, every connection to our customer’s corporate application gets an additional layer of identity assurance without the need to connect to VPN.
• Identity Providers — Easily integrate your organization’s single sign-on provider and benefit from the ease-of-use and functionality of Cloudflare Access.

These partner programs have helped us serve our customers better alongside our partners with our complementary solutions. The integrations we have driven have made it easy for thousands of customers to use Cloudflare with other parts of their stack.

We aim to continue expanding the Cloudflare Partner Network to make it seamless for our customers to use Cloudflare. To support our growing ecosystem of partners, we are excited to launch our Technology Partner Program.

Announcing Cloudflare’s Technology Partner Program

Cloudflare’s Technology Partner Program facilitates innovative integrations that create value for our customers, our technology partners, and Cloudflare. Our partners not only benefit from technical integrations with us, but also have the opportunity to drive sales and marketing efforts to better serve mutual customers and prospects.

This program offers a guiding structure so that our partners can benefit across three key areas:

• Build with Cloudflare: Sandbox access to Cloudflare enterprise features and APIs to build and test integrations. Opportunity to collaborate with Cloudflare’s product teams to build innovative solutions.
• Market with Cloudflare: Develop joint solution brief and host joint events to drive awareness and adoption of integrations. Leverage a range of our partners tools and resources to bring our joint solutions to market.
• Sell with Cloudflare: Align with our sales teams to jointly target relevant customer segments across geographies.

Technology Partner Tiers

Depending on the maturity of the integration and fit with Cloudflare’s product portfolio, we have two types of partners:

• Strategic partners: Strategic partners have mature integrations across the Cloudflare product suite. They are leaders in their industries and have a significant overlap with our customer base. These partners are strategically aligned with our sales and marketing efforts, and they collaborate with our product teams to bring innovative solutions to market.
• Integration partners: Integration partners are early participants in Cloudflare’s partnership ecosystem. They already have or are on a path to build validated, functional integrations with Cloudflare. These partners have programmatic access to resources that will help them experiment with and build integrations with Cloudflare.

Work with Us

If you are interested in working with our Technology Partnerships team to develop and bring to market a joint solution, we’d love to hear from you!  Partners can complete the application on our Technology Partner Program website and we will reach out quickly to discuss how we can help build solutions for our customers together.