Jonathon Dixon: Why I joined Cloudflare

I’m excited to announce that on March 1, I joined Cloudflare as Vice President and GM, Asia Pacific (including Japan and Greater China) to help build and expand Cloudflare’s growing customer and partner base and presence in the region. We currently have over 200 passionate and customer-focused employees in APAC, with offices in Beijing, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.

Singapore is where I’m based. Melbourne is home with my early years spent in Country Victoria. I love the outdoors, sports, travelling and spending time with family and friends. I am naturally intrigued by interesting people and different perspectives. I have a thirst for learning and understanding why people act and behave the way they do, and believe that understanding more about different cultures makes me a better person/leader. And what better way to do so than by being in the most diverse region in the world — Asia Pacific is home to 60% of the world’s population, with thousands of languages spoken, spanning multiple time zones. With the rise of innovation and technology adoption in the region, growth and expansion opportunities are endless.

Throughout my 20-year career, I have been extremely fortunate to work for companies that were instrumental in technological transformations, which have made a huge impact on the way we do business and everyday life. From IBM to Cisco to Amazon Web Services, these companies have pioneered innovations that transformed legacy systems, processes, and ways of working into intuitive platforms that enable scale, cost efficiencies, collaboration, and connectivity everywhere.

This brings me to Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. The Internet is the lifeblood of business and the primary vehicle of commerce and communication for people around the world. While it was brilliantly architected, it was not designed to deliver the security, performance, and reliability required for businesses today. For decades, a number of vendors built a range of standalone hardware boxes to address the emerging requirements for security, performance, and reliability. These boxes could be deployed in on-prem data centers to deliver functions and to alleviate some of the Internet’s fundamental security, performance, and reliability problems. And then, the cloud happened.

Organizations now exist in a complex infrastructure environment that highlights the Internet’s fundamental problems more than ever. The on-prem boxes that they once relied upon to solve these problems were never designed to work in such an environment. As a result, a major architectural shift at the network layer is now underway, and Cloudflare is leading this transition. Cloudflare is well-positioned to transform the way we do business by providing security, enhancing the performance of business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual network hardware, all within a global cloud platform.

Asia Pacific currently has the largest number of Internet users globally, with more than 53 percent of its population now online. What’s more, the coronavirus pandemic has only reinforced what was already an upward trend — e-commerce — with about 75 percent of global retail growth coming from the region. The rise in Internet traffic also means an increase in online threats that are becoming highly sophisticated, automated, and distributed. Unfortunately, cyber threats do not just impact retailers. All other industries, from manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, government, are not excluded. With business moving more and more to the cloud, organizations now require network and security capabilities that will allow them to be agile, nimble, and secure at any given time. This is where Cloudflare can help.

I’m really excited to work with our customers in APAC and talk about all of Cloudflare’s capabilities, because I truly believe that our products and solutions will make a huge impact in the region. As I begin this role, my priorities are around building a diverse and entrepreneurial team, generating brand visibility, and creating strategic customer relationships enabled by a vibrant partner ecosystem with a strong customer focus. I hope to build a team that is passionate about our customers and their success. We have a tremendous opportunity to create pockets of innovation with our customers, leveraging learnings, not only from our global counterparts but also from within the region. The best part? We’re just getting started!