We live in some interesting times. Who would have thought we’d see another billion dollar CDN besides Akamai in 2015. CloudFlare is a billion dollar CDN, and we can say it confidently. No other CDN comes close to a billion dollar valuation, not even one of our favorites Aryaka Networks. We really thought Aryaka Networks would be the first one to reach the billion dollar status, but they’ve kind of lost their sparkle. However, we don’t believe CloudFlare is multi-billion CDN, regardless of what venture capitalist believe. A billion dollar CDN is good enough, in fact its phenomenal.
With Google as a partner, the expectations for CloudFlare to perform have sky rocketed, and they will have to reach the stars to be considered a success. The best metric for success is revenue and market penetration. If CloudFlare increases revenue to $250M in 2016, and then $500M in 2017, that is phenomenal success. Can they reach that goal? Yes, and we’ll be foolish to think otherwise. The momentum is in CloudFlare’s court, and they can surpass CloudFront, Level 3 and EdgeCast in the revenue department. However, they will have to put that money and brain to work immediately. We have some ideas on how they can do it, but we’ll let them figure it out.