Cloudflare Partners: A New Program with New Partners

Many overlook a critical portion of the language in Cloudflare’s mission: “to help build a better Internet.” From the beginning, we knew a mission this bold, an undertaking of this magnitude, couldn’t be done alone. We could only help. To ultimately build a better Internet, it would take a diverse and engaged ecosystem of technologies, customers, partners, and end-users. Fortunately, we’ve been able to work with amazing partners as we’ve grown, and we are eager to announce new, specific programs to grow our ecosystem with an increasingly diverse set of partners.

Today, we’re excited to announce the latest iteration of our partnership program for solutions partners. These categories encompass resellers and referral partners, OEM partners, and the new partner services program. Over the past few years, we’ve grown and learned from some amazing partnerships, and want to bring those best practices to our latest partners at scale—to help them grow their business with Cloudflare’s global network.

Partner Program for Solution Partners

Every partner program out there has tiers, and Cloudflare’s program is no exception. However, our tiering was built to help our partners ramp up, accelerate and move fast. As Matt Harrell highlighted, we Continue reading

Announcing the New Cloudflare Partner Platform

When I first started at Cloudflare over two years ago, one of the first things I was tasked with was to help evolve our partner platform to support the changes in our service and the expanding needs of our partners and customers. Cloudflare’s existing partner platform was released in 2010. It is a testament to those who built it, that it was, and still is, in use today—but it was also clear that the landscape had substantially changed.

Since the launch of the existing partner platform, we had built and expanded multi-user access, and launched many new products: Argo, Load Balancing, and Cloudflare Workers, to name a few. Retrofitting the existing offering was not practical. Cloudflare needed a new partner platform that could meet the needs of partners and their customers.

As the team started to develop a new solution, we needed to find a partner who could keep us on the right path. The number of hypotheticals were infinite and we needed a first customer to ground ourselves. Lo and behold, not long after I had begun putting pen to paper, we found the perfect partner for the new platform.

The IBM Partnership

IBM was looking for a partner Continue reading

BrandPost: What to do when yesterday’s technology won’t meet today’s support needs

You probably already know that end user technology is exploding and are feeling the effects of it in your support organization every day. Remember when IT sanctioned and standardized every hardware and software instance in the workplace? Those days are long gone. Today, it’s the driving force of productivity that dictates what will or won’t be used – and that can be hard on a support organization.Whatever users need to do their jobs better, faster, more efficiently is what you are seeing come into the workplace. So naturally, that’s what comes into your service desk too. Support organizations see all kinds of devices, applications, systems, and equipment, and it’s adding a great deal of complexity and demand to keep up with. In fact, four of the top five factors causing support ticket volumes to rise are attributed to new and current technology.To read this article in full, please click here

Stop Using GUI to Configure SDN or Intent-Based Products

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

At the end of my vNIC 2018 keynote speech I made a statement along these lines:

The moment you start using GUI with an SDN product you’re back to square one.

That claim confused a few people – Mark left this comment on my blog:

Mavenir and Big Switch Networks: Working together to bring 5G revolution

Where Does Nvidia Go In The Datacenter From Here?

We have to admit that it is often a lot more fun watching an upstart carve out whole new slices of business, or create them out of what appears to be thin air, in the datacenter than it is to watch how it will respond to intense competitive pressures and somehow manage to keep growing despite that. …

Where Does Nvidia Go In The Datacenter From Here? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

BrandPost: Achieve Compliant, Cost-effective Hybrid Cloud Operations

Enterprises are introducing cloud services to improve productivity, increase business agility, and accelerate the pace of innovation. But adopting this new paradigm while delivering the right level of visibility and control can overtax resources and impact existing governance, risk, compliance, and cost strategies. In addition, organizations often lack a holistic view of their security posture and state of controls to satisfy internal and/or external regulators.This guide will help you discover ways to fine-tune oversight and operations of your hybrid cloud solution.Click here to download the white paper.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft, Oracle Link Clouds to Support Enterprise Workloads

Rakuten, NEC Jointly Develop 5G vRAN Equipment

SentinelOne Scores $120M Series D Amid Skyrocketing Growth

Orange Flags LTE-M Roaming With AT&T, KPN, and Swisscom

Silver Peak Partners With NSC for Managed SD-WAN Services

Cisco Sees Service Providers as Three Sales Models

Reading a transcript where Jonathan Davidson is taking to analysts and investors at the recent conference. He is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Service Provider Business since August 2018.  He stats that the SP market is three distinct businesses” What SP buy for their own networks What SP consume as corporate IT […]

The post Cisco Sees Service Providers as Three Sales Models appeared first on EtherealMind.

Check Your Firefox Privacy Settings

Firefox 67 comes with boosted privacy settings but they aren’t activated by default if you have been using Firefox previously. Blocking trackers and privacy threats sometimes caused web pages to break so Mozilla has taken a cautious approach.

The post Check Your Firefox Privacy Settings appeared first on EtherealMind.

VCs Look Beyond Architecture for Next Chip Success Stories

At The Next AI Platform event in May, we brought together a few leading investors on the deep learning chip front to talk about how they consider architecture, software, competitiveness, and market potential from the various approaches for both training and inference. …

VCs Look Beyond Architecture for Next Chip Success Stories was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

Datanauts 166: Can You Hire ‘DevOps’?

Matt Stratton beams aboard the Datanauts starship to share his opinions and experiences with DevOps. Is DevOps a role you can hire for, or a culture you create? If it's the later, how do you get started, what are the impacts, and how do you iterate?

The post Datanauts 166: Can You Hire ‘DevOps’? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Enhancing the Optimizely Experimentation Platform with Cloudflare Workers

This is a joint post by Whelan Boyd, Senior Product Manager at Optimizely and Remy Guercio, Product Marketing Manager for Cloudflare Workers.

Experimentation is an important ingredient in driving business growth: whether you’re iterating on a product or testing new messaging, there’s no substitute for the data and insights gathered from conducting rigorous experiments in the wild.

Optimizely is the world’s leading experimentation platform, with thousands of customers worldwide running tests for over 140 million visitors daily. If Optimizely were a website, it would be the third most trafficked in the US.  And when it came time to experiment with reinvigorating their own platform, Optimizely chose Cloudflare Workers.

Improving Performance and Agility with Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers is a globally distributed serverless compute platform that runs across Cloudflare’s network of 180 locations worldwide. Workers are designed for flexibility, with many different use cases ranging from customizing configuration of Cloudflare services and features to building full, independent applications.

In this post, we’re going to focus on how Workers can be used to improve performance and increase agility for more complex applications. One of the key benefits of Workers is that they allow developers to move decision logic and data Continue reading

Cisco will use AI/ML to boost intent-based networking

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are expected to be some of the big topics at next week’s Cisco Live event and the company is already talking about how those technologies will help drive the next generation of Intent-Based Networking.“Artificial intelligence will change how we manage networks, and it’s a change we need,” wrote John Apostolopoulos Cisco CTO and vice president of Enterprise Networking in a blog about how Cisco says these technologies impact the network. [ Now see 7 free network tools you must have. ] AI is the next major step for networking capabilities, and while researchers have talked in the past about how great AI would be, now the compute power and algorithms exist to make it possible, Apostolopoulos told Network World. To read this article in full, please click here

Thought For My Day: Blitzscaling is Monopoly Building

The negatives of blitzscaling, a critique of building a monopoly

The post Thought For My Day: Blitzscaling is Monopoly Building appeared first on EtherealMind.

Want to Make a Difference in Your Community? Apply for a Beyond the Net Medium or Large Grant

Applications are now open for the 2019 Beyond the Net Medium and Large Grants. All Internet Society Chapters and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in good standing are eligible to apply.

For more than a decade, Beyond the Net Medium and Large Grants and the former Community Grants Programme have played a major role in empowering people to improve their communities via the Internet. These programmes have reached thousands of people by helping to bring to life community-driven projects that teach digital skills, enable continued trust in the Internet, build infrastructure in rural and underserved areas, and connect Indigenous communities.

The Beyond the Net Funding Programme is now part of the Internet Society Foundation, but will continue to support the excellent work of our Chapter and SIG communities. The Medium and Large Grants are available for funding at a maximum of USD $30,000.

Applications are open until 31 July 2019. For more details, visit Beyond the Net Medium and Large Grant Programme page. 

While you’re there, check out everything else the Foundation is doing!

The post Want to Make a Difference in Your Community? Apply for a Beyond the Net Medium or Large Grant appeared first on Internet Society.