Bienvenue Cloudflare France! Why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in France

If you'd like to read this post in French click here.

I am incredibly excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as its Head of France to help build a better Internet and expand the company’s growing customer base in France. This is an important milestone for Cloudflare as we continue to grow our presence in Europe. Alongside our London, Munich, and Lisbon offices, Paris marks the fourth Cloudflare office in the EMEA region. With this, we’ll be able to further serve our customers’ demand, recruit local talent, and build on the successes we’ve had in our other offices around the globe. I have been impressed by what Cloudflare has built in EMEA including France, and I am even more excited by what lies ahead for our customers, partners, and employees.

Born in Paris and raised in Paris, Normandie and Germany, I started my career more than 20 years ago. While a teenager, I had the chance to work on one of the first Apple IIe’s available in France. I have always had a passion for technology and continue to be amazed by the value of its adoption with businesses large and small. In former roles as Solution Engineer to Account Manager, Partner Director to Sales Director, and more recently Country Manager—I’ve had the chance to manage different sizes of businesses and teams, and am passionate about seeking out and providing the best solutions and value to customers and their challenging yet unique needs.

In 2011, I opened the Amazon Web Services office in France. Over the last nine years, I have advised and helped a large number of companies, across varying industries and sizes, move from on-premise infrastructure to cloud and SaaS architectures. I have seen that this major and inevitable transition has increased, exponentially, the complexity of architecture with heterogeneous infrastructure environments across public cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments. The threat landscape, functional requirements, and scale of business applications have evolved faster than ever before, and the volume and sophistication of network attacks can strain the defensive capabilities of even the most advanced enterprises. This is forcing a major architectural shift in how enterprises address security, performance, and reliability at the network layer.

Today, companies’ digital assets (web properties, applications, APIs, and on) have become their most valuable asset. How organizations are able to use the Internet to serve their customers, partners, and employees—is now a strategic priority for organizations around the world. Cloudflare is leading this transition.

Here are four reasons why I’m joining and embarking on this amazing journey.

• Cloudflare’s customer base and growth: I have been impressed with the growth, technology, and pace of adoption behind the company’s suite of products. Cloudflare is servicing Internet properties of more than 3.2 million customers that are relying on us around the world, including approximately 16 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies. From the public sector to enterprises to startups—companies of all sizes and types are being powered by these critical security, performance, and reliability services. Every day thousands of new customers sign up for Cloudflare services.

• Cloudflare’s Global Network: I discovered early on that Cloudflare is powered by its global network that is always learning and growing. This means, as companies grow and expand, Cloudflare will be able to help them scale and support their growth. This network spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. With more than 1 billion unique IP addresses passing through it every day, it works as an immune system continuously learning and adapting to new threats, as well as optimizing itself which benefits all of Cloudflare customers and users worldwide. Cloudflare’s network operates within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the Internet-connected population in the developed world (for context, the blink of an eye is 300-400 milliseconds!). What’s more, this network blocked on average 76 billion cyber threats each day last quarter.

• Cloudflare’s technology and pace of innovation: At Cloudflare, the pace of innovation has stunned me. Leveraging its unique global network, the company is continuously releasing new products and features in the cloud that are available at a massive scale—worldwide to its customers and users. I discovered some products which are disrupting traditional IT approaches. To name a few: Cloudflare One, a platform to connect and secure companies and teams anywhere (remote and across offices) and on any device; Cloudflare Workers, a serverless solution redefining how applications are deployed at the network edge; Magic Transit, which delivers the power of Cloudflare services for your on-premise, cloud-hosted, and hybrid networks; Argo Smart Routing which acts as Waze for the Internet, can significantly cut the amount of time users online spend waiting for content; and Cloudflare Web Analytics, a privacy-first solution to give marketers and web creators the information they need in a simple, clean way that doesn't sacrifice visitor privacy.

• The company’s culture. During the interview process, I had the chance to meet many Cloudflare employees including some of the leadership team. I met a very diverse team of incredibly smart, curious, kind, and committed people. I was impressed by the builder mindset in all of the people I talked to, and all are truly passionate about the Cloudflare mission. I also loved the culture of openness, collaboration, and transparency—which aligns with the values I have embraced since I started my career. This wider Cloudflare mission has resonated with me: to help build a better Internet. In doing this, we provide organizations with powerful technologies that, previously, could only be used by those that could afford those large expenses and complexities to implement and maintain.

In France, you can find a vibrant startup ecosystem, large enterprises, and a very active SMB business environment. Cloudflare has had customers in France from the very early days and today we have thousands of French customers spanning the country from not only startups, to SMBs and enterprises, but also government, education, and non-profit organizations. More than 25 percent of the CAC 40 are using Cloudflare services. Major French enterprises such as L’Oréal, Solocal, Criteo, Allianz France, DPD Group (le Groupe LaPoste), and more are protecting and accelerating their Internet properties with Cloudflare services. In addition, more than 30 percent of the Next40 are equipped with Cloudflare’s Internet security, performance, and reliability solutions—such as Back Market, Happn, Wildmoka, and SendinBlue. We take pride in being relied on by these organizations and are eager to help more French companies grow.

Since the beginning of the year, the rise in remote work, cyber threats, and stress on online assets has generated an even greater need to provide secure, fast, and reliable Internet services. This goes for employees, customers, and partners—of any organization. As a result, this demand has never been so critical. We’re here to work with all types of customers. If you are a business, a public sector organisation, an NGO—or anyone that has cybersecurity, performance, or reliability challenges or questions—get in touch with us. We’d love to explore how we can help. If you are a system integrator, consulting company, MSP, and so on—let’s explore a partnership on how we may be able to help you accelerate your business.

If you are interested in joining Cloudflare and helping to build a more secure, fast, and reliable Internet—please explore our open positions and select Paris, France as the location. We are hiring talented people locally and globally, now building our initial team of Account Executives, Channel Managers, Business Development Representatives, Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers, and more—to further serve our current customers and grow with more organizations in France.It is a great honour for me to be part of the Cloudflare family, to help build Cloudflare’s future in France, and help French organizations grow. Feel free to reach out to me at blecoeur@cloudflare.com