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I am excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as Managing Director for the Middle East and Turkey (MET) region. Having worked in the domain of cyber security for more than two decades, I can see that Cloudflare is genuine in its mission of building a better Internet that is fast, safe and reliable for everyone. Being part of this journey that touches everyone’s life is surely an exciting thing to do, and I look forward to putting my experience in play towards successfully achieving this goal.
Cloudflare has been associated with delivering fast content over cloud in a most reliable and secure manner, accounting for at least 20% of the global Internet traffic. Cloudflare can cater for and support all types of organizations (businesses and public sector) including those with a social mission. The Middle East and Turkey as an emerging market is characterized by a relatively young population, with 70% of it being under the age of 30. This dynamic youth segment has an insatiable demand for both content and knowledge. To that extent, there has been a rapid uptake in Internet use, and digital transformation initiatives have significantly accelerated over the past couple of years; this trend represents an opportunity for Cloudflare to add considerable value to regional enterprises and in doing so, increase its footprint and market share.
Personally, building a regional presence and delivering business growth for global software and technology providers is something that I've always enjoyed doing throughout my career and I look forward to helping Cloudflare successfully establish the right level of presence in this fast-growing and dynamic market.
I join Cloudflare with over two decades of experience, mostly in the cybersecurity and software industry, where over the past years I helped global technology providers establish and expand presence and operation in the emerging markets, particularly in the Middle East and Turkey. Prior to joining Cloudflare, I was the Managing Director and Head of Sales for Emerging Markets at CyberRes, the cybersecurity line of business at MicroFocus, managing the sales and business development across the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Russia, CIS and CEE. Before that I led StarLink Value Added Distribution as their CEO across a 22 country operation, managing their annual business of close to $500M. In addition, I held several leadership positions at major technology vendors such as Symantec, BlueCoat, Fortinet and CyberGuard.
So after all this experience, why did I join Cloudflare?
I enjoy launching operations from inception in the region. Building successful teams that can deliver future incremental growth and objectives and supporting our customers is an exciting challenge. Moreover, the MET region made up of 13 countries with fast-growing and innovation-driven economies presents a unique growth opportunity for Cloudflare to tap into.
I can confidently say that the Middle East and Turkey markets are nowadays at the forefront of technology and early adopters of disruptive technologies such as cloud on a global scale.
This is being driven by many factors such as Digital Transformation where several countries have embraced ambitious programs transforming them into true digital economies. Cloud uptake has accelerated over the past few years in the region and the necessary regulatory frameworks and related compliance policies are now in place to propel enterprises into the next phase of leveraging the benefits of cloud. This transformation is further accelerated as earlier mentioned, by a mostly young and content demanding population-that content being gaming, entertainment, educational, sports or online retail.
The recent pandemic has for sure played a major role in building up this momentum and increasing the urgency in speeding up such a transition.
The parallel increase of cyber threats and associated breaches, puts Cloudflare in an unparalleled and unique position to deliver the required content in a reliable, fast and secure manner to individuals, businesses and public sector alike, elevating the levels of productivity and performance in addition to reducing complexity for users.
To do that, Cloudflare has built a global network and infrastructure across 275 cities around the world with 27 in the MET region, delivering the same connectivity at 50ms performance for more than 95% of customers. The innovation path is stunning. Not only do we provide best in class cyber security solutions with Cloudflare’s SASE security platform, Cloudflare One, a Zero Trust network-as-a-service platform that dynamically connects users to enterprise resources, with identity-based security controls delivered close to users, wherever they are, but we also offer an open strong developer platform with Cloudflare Workers. As we just had our Platform Week, I invite you to check our latest announcements.
Looking ahead
Having spoken to so many customers in the region, I understand that nowadays more than ever, they need to be able to grow their operations by focusing on their core mission without having to worry about their technology. Cloudflare appears to me as one of the most innovative customer-centric companies in the market. More than just technology, we are on a mission to help to build a fast, reliable and secure Internet for a maximum number of people, businesses, and public organizations.
I look forward to contributing towards the future of digital transformation in the Middle East and Turkey, while delivering solutions that will support all the innovative projects that are already on their way or in the pipeline.
Cloudflare has an exceptional company culture with key values such as diversity, principle, collaboration, innovation and transparency. One of my goals is to build a successful team through empowering current team members and attracting future talents that would all contribute towards this journey. Therefore, I encourage anyone sharing the same ambitions and interested in joining our winning team to keep track of our new roles by exploring open positions
I am extremely proud to launch our regional base out of Dubai, to be followed by additional regional expansions in the future. Currently, Cloudflare has 27 data centers distributed across major cities in the MET region, and we have plans to add more in the near future such as the Jeddah datacenter recently announced. All this to cope with the growth in demand that we are forecasting and to help us position Cloudflare as the brand of choice in the region.