Cloudflare’s Tom Evans Captures Channel Madness Victory Amid Major Partner Push

Both Evans and the tournament’s other finalist, 1Password’s Lori Cornmesser, told CRN that massive cybersecurity opportunities and an expanded focus on the channel are delivering huge wins with the help of partners.

Cloudflare’s accelerated push with partners over the past year—focused on capturing massive growth opportunities in cybersecurity and SASE with the help of the channel—helped to deliver a win for Chief Partner Officer Tom Evans in CRN’s 2025 Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs.

Evans brought in 52 percent of the votes in the final round of the 11th annual tournament, narrowly defeating 1Password’s Lori Cornmesser, who ended with 48 percent.

The victory comes a year after Evans joined Cloudflare to head up the company’s transition into becoming a channel-focused company offering a broad platform for SASE (secure access service edge), application security and other cloud technologies.

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“I think a year later, this is a lot of vindication of what we’re doing in the market, of really putting partners first and transforming our company to becoming a partner-first company,” he told CRN. “Winning this is just a great testament to the company [and] the team we’ve built around us that is really focused on partners.”

The tournament also saw a strong showing from Cornmesser, vice president of channel and alliance sales at 1Pasword, another channel chief whose company is in the midst of a major shift in the direction of working with partners.

Cornmesser told CRN that while she has taken part in Channel Madness a number of times in the past, “I’ve never seen the support that I’ve seen with the 1Password partners [and] with the 1Password team.”

The advancement to the championship round is just one of many indicators that “we are becoming trusted and that we have the respect of the partner community,” said Cornmesser, who joined the password management and SaaS access management vendor in September. “It’s just overwhelming to see.”

Back-To-Back Wins

For Evans, it was his second year in a row of taking the top prize in the Channel Madness tournament, though the 2024 win came shortly after he’d departed as channel chief of Palo Alto Networks to take the role at Cloudflare.

In the 2025 tournament, Evans’ path to the championship began with his defeat of Microsoft’s Ralph Haupter in the first round. He then overcame Schneider Electric’s Gordon Lord, Lenovo’s Rob Cato and Sophos’ Scott Barlow in the following three rounds before surpassing 1Password’s Cornmesser in the final round to claim the crown.

Evans said the strong support from the partner community is reflective of Cloudflare’s shift to a channel-focused sales strategy that has ramped up substantially since his arrival in April 2024.

Notably, the Cloudflare sales team is increasingly embracing the idea of doing deals in concert with partners, he said. “It’s almost like a lightbulb moment where a lot of our sales reps and sales leaders are like, ‘Wow, we couldn’t get into this account for a number of years. But we talked to this partner who has a relationship [with the customer] and we have a meeting next week with the [customer’s] CIO.’”

All around, “we’re starting to see significant growth in our partner-initiated opportunities,” Evans said. “But we’re also seeing huge growth in the deals that we’re providing to partners.”

Cloudflare partners who spoke with CRN applauded the company’s channel-focused moves with Evans leading the charge over the past year.

“We have definitely picked up a lot of momentum with Cloudflare [since] Tom Evans was hired as channel chief,” said Alpesh Shah, vice president of security strategic alliances at New York-based Myriad360, No. 185 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2024.

Without a doubt, Evans has “been building the right kind of channel partner program,” Shah said. “And right now, I feel that those things are bearing some fruit.”

Engaging With Partners

Right off the bat, Cloudflare sent a positive signal to the channel about its intentions by giving Evans a C-level position as chief partner officer, according to Scott Goree, senior vice president for partners, alliances and ecosystems at Denver-based Optiv, No. 25 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500.

“We see this pivot [for Cloudflare] from a company that had a good direct business to really shift to more of a channel business,” Goree said.

Cloudflare has shown its commitment to partners, for instance, by turning to Optiv to help meet the needs of some customers that had previously been directly served by the vendor, he said.

“They’re engaging Optiv to help with the customer life cycle—to really drive more adoption, drive upsell,” Goree said. “We’re seeing the growth, and we’re seeing where Cloudflare is bringing us into some opportunities. And we’re helping with our capability to expand [customer adoption].”

At New York-based Kyndryl, which had already been a major partner of Cloudflare even prior to Evans’ arrival, the momentum has continued to build for the partnership, according to an executive.

Cloudflare has supported the growth as it has “invested a lot in building those channel capabilities” that it didn’t have previously as a direct business, said Chris McReynolds, vice president for global offering management, edge compute and network at Kyndryl, No. 8 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500.

At the same time, in terms of its platform, Cloudflare has “come a really long way” in becoming a true enterprise security company, McReynolds said.

Cloudflare has doubled down in recent years on building out SASE and security service edge (SSE) offerings, which are in high demand as a way to provide secure access to distributed workforces.

Cloudflare reports that its SASE platform—as well as security offerings such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation and web application firewall—leverage the vendor’s global network, which covers 335 cities across more than 125 countries.

Cloudflare has also expanded aggressively into offering cloud-delivered compute, storage and other developer services, in addition to continuing to operate its widely used web content delivery service.

1Password’s MSP Push

1Password has also made huge strides over the past year in becoming a channel-oriented company, expanding from its roots as a consumer password management provider, according to partner executives.

Most recently, 1Password launched an MSP version of its Enterprise Password Manager as a sign of where the company is looking to go with service provider partners, executives have said.

Ultimately, 1Password has been “making improvements to the way that we wanted to address common partner challenges—in program structures, in deal protection concerns, co-selling support—all by really refining our program,” Cornmesser said. “That [is] 1Password’s way of doubling down on its commitment to partner success in that area.”

The vendor is also expanding beyond password management with its acquisition in January of SaaS access management company Trelica, which serves to boost the vendor’s capabilities around the discovery of unsanctioned “shadow IT” usage.

1Password’s shift into embracing a partner-focused approach has been “very impressive” so far, according to Dustin Leggans, founder and CEO of OSA Technology Partners, a Columbus, Ohio-based 1Password MSP partner.

“A lot of companies have talked about wanting to work alongside the managed service provider space, but very few of them actually execute that very well,” Leggans said.

However, “once [1Password] said that they actually followed through on it,” he said.

As an example, 1Password has taken major strides to shift enterprise customers over to be managed with the help of OSA—and has done so “in a way that was really seamless for everybody,” Leggans said. “That was a big deal.”

Channel Chiefs Making A Difference

At GuidePoint Security, which partners with both Cloudflare and 1Password, executive Mark Thornberry said the two vendors are both undoubtedly providing major opportunities to partners and are each getting a boost from their strong channel leaders.

Cornmesser is a well-known channel veteran who’s “not wasting any time” when it comes to deepening the channel emphasis at 1Password, said Thornberry, senior vice president for vendor management at Herndon, Va.-based GuidePoint, No. 39 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500.

“As soon as [Cornmesser] got there, she really started to look for opportunities where we can work together,” Thornberry said. “I give her a lot of credit.”

And likewise, when it comes to Evans, there’s no question that he has been making key moves that have “recalibrated” Cloudflare’s partner initiatives for the better, Thornberry said.

Looking ahead, “our business should continue to be up into the right with [Cloudflare],” he said. “I totally expect that that partnership will continue to grow.”