I am excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as the Head of Southeast Asia and Korea (SEAK) region to help build a better Internet and to expand Cloudflare’s growing customer, partner and local teams across all the countries in SEAK. Cloudflare is at an emergence phase in this region, with immense growth potential, and this is just the beginning. Cloudflare has had a lot of success globally and our charter is to build on that success and momentum to grow our presence locally to address the demands in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Indochina and Korea. Customer engagements in each of the countries in SEAK presents a unique, rich and fulfilling engagement each with their own intricacies.
A little about me
I was born in India (Surat, Gujarat), and at the age of four our family moved to Bahrain where we lived for eight years. We then moved to New Zealand, which is where I completed my senior years of high school and also my Bachelor’s Degree in Information Engineering at Massey University. After graduation, we moved to Melbourne, Australia which is our family home and where my career started.
I love meeting and working with diverse and interesting people who bring different views, thoughts and perspectives. The experiences growing up and working in so many countries has made me a more dynamic leader, while working with so many cultures and diverse teams. Diversity is what drives innovation and growth, more so true than ever in this exciting region.
I love my sports (cricket, squash, golf), traveling and spending time with family & friends.
My journey to Cloudflare
I joined IBM Australia as a graduate in 1997, gaining valuable experiences across many roles from delivery to sales, in a career spanning 15 years. Having been in the IT industry for more than 27 years, career experiences at large global organisations like IBM, SAP, Cisco, NTT and Oracle, all of these amazing organisations and colleagues (many of whom are friends), have provided me with the best set of tools and experiences which I can bring to Cloudflare to help drive the growth agenda.
Below are the main reasons I joined Cloudflare to embark on this amazing journey:
Cloudflare’s Growth potential: Cloudflare has an immense growth potential in APJC and subsequently in Southeast Asia & Korea. In our recently announced Q3 earnings, we reported a 51% year-over-year increase in revenue, with a record addition of 170 large customers.
Cloudflare’s ever-growing Portfolio: I was lucky enough to join during Birthday Week, Cloudflare’s 11th birthday. Many new products and solutions were announced during the week to further enhance our growing portfolio of solutions. I am amazed at the pace of innovation, where Cloudflare is continuously releasing new products and features on the Cloud that are then instantly available at all our data centers globally for our clients to consume and adopt.
Cloudflare People: During the interview process, I met with 11 Cloudflare colleagues, and all of these felt more like a discussion with a two-way dialogue and a view for Cloudflare to get to know me better, and for me to better understand Cloudflare. This emphasised in my mind the like-minded people I will be working with, where we all work collaboratively, leveraging the experiences we all bring from our past to achieve greater outcomes.
Cloudflare Culture: having now met with so many of my colleagues at Cloudflare, the one thing that stands out for me is the humility with which everyone operates from Global and Regional leaders to our local teams. The all-inclusive culture at Cloudflare along with the three tenets of Curious, Transparent and Principled are very much aligned with my personal principles: Honesty, Integrity and Transparency.
It is an exciting time to be joining one the fastest growing Cloud companies in the world and I want to be part of the Cloudflare journey and contribute to the growth agenda.
We’re just getting started…
I am convinced that Cloudflare is and will be an even bigger global IT giant. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet, by working collaboratively with our customers to make them more secure, providing a high level of performance to support their business critical applications, while reducing cost and the complexity of managing their network infrastructure.
The Southeast Asia and Korea region is such a diverse, dynamic and exciting region to be in, where the potential for growth is limitless. As many as 40 million people in six countries across the region — Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand — came online for the first time in 2020. That pushed the total number of internet users in Southeast Asia to 400 million with some of the biggest ecommerce markets in the world.
Similarly, Korea has the highest internet penetration rate with 96% of its population online. On top of that, the government is investing heavily in its Digital New Deal program, which will focus on development of technologies based on data, networks and AI, as well as a digitization plan that will create job opportunities in a number of industries across the country.
Cloudflare is in a unique position to transform the way business is conducted in this region with its global cloud platform that delivers a broad range of network and security services to businesses of all sizes across all geographies. Coverage across Large Enterprises, Public Sector, Mid-Market, Start-ups to the individual developer: companies of all sizes across all industries are being powered by Cloudflare to provide Security, Performance, and Reliability services.
If you are interested in joining Cloudflare and helping to build a more secure, fast, and reliable Internet, do explore our open roles. We are hiring talented people locally, building and strengthening our local teams across: Strategic / Account Executives, Channel Managers, Business Development Representatives, Strategic / Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers and more.
It is a great honour and a privilege for me to be part of the Cloudflare family to help build Cloudflare’s future in Southeast Asia and Korea. The potential opportunity is enormous, and we are just getting started.
Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].