Cloudflare Poaches Alteryx CEO Mark Anderson For Exec Role

The company named Anderson, whose previous roles included serving as president at Palo Alto Networks, as its new president of revenue.

Cloudflare announced Thursday that it has hired Alteryx CEO Mark Anderson to become its new president of revenue, as the company continues ramping up its efforts with channel partners including MSSPs.

Anderson, who’d been the CEO at analytics platform provider Alteryx for more than three years, had previously served as president at Palo Alto Networks, a major Cloudflare rival in market segments including SASE (secure access service edge).

Anderson has been a member of Cloudflare’s board since 2019.

The company said that Anderson is replacing Marc Boroditsky, who joined Cloudflare as its president of revenue in November 2022. Boroditsky was quoted in the company’s news release saying that he is “committed to supporting this transition.”

In the release, Cloudflare Co-Founder and CEO Matthew Prince praised Boroditsky’s accomplishments as president of revenue, which included helping to drive “continued growth” for the IT connectivity and security services vendor.

As for Anderson taking over the role, “it’s not often that a such a unique opportunity like this presents itself,” Prince said in the release.

Ultimately, with Anderson, Cloudflare is “hiring a respected industry veteran with a proven track record of driving growth at scale across multiple enterprise technology organizations, who also has a deep knowledge of our business, leadership, and team,” Prince said.

Prior to joining Alteryx as CEO in October 2020, Anderson had spent more than six years at Palo Alto Networks, joining the company in 2012 as an executive vice president.

He was promoted to president at Palo Alto Networks in August 2016, but departed in late 2018 several months after being passed over for the CEO position, which went to Nikesh Arora.

During his tenure at Palo Alto Networks, Anderson was “instrumental” in scaling the company “from pre-IPO to more than $2.5 billion in annualized revenue,” Cloudflare said in its release.

Earlier in his career, Anderson spent nearly eight years as executive vice president of worldwide sales at F5.

Alteryx, meanwhile, said in a news release Thursday that it has appointed CFO Kevin Rubin as interim CEO following Anderson’s departure. The exit comes after publicly traded Alteryx announced in December that it had reached a $4.4 billion deal to be taken private through an acquisition by Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners.

Partner Push

Cloudflare has been working aggressively over the past year to expand its work with partners, particularly MSSPs, with a focus around its SASE and zero trust security offerings, executives told CRN previously.

In September, Cloudflare Channel Chief Matt Harrell said the company has implemented updates across provisioning, management and pricing as part of making the company’s offerings more attractive to service providers such as MSSPs.

Prince, meanwhile, told CRN last summer that optimizing Cloudflare’s engagement with partners and enabling the channel to bring the company’s SASE platform to customers has been a major focus for him.

“Where I’m spending a lot more time is with our partners making sure that we’ve got a robust partner program, making sure that we’re supporting that channel well, making sure that we’ve got clear pricing and that we’ve got clear ways of working with various partners around the world,” he said.

On Thursday, Cloudflare announced that its fourth-quarter revenue surged 32 percent, year over year, to reach $362.5 million. The results beat Wall Street analysts expectations and led Cloudflare’s stock price to jump 20 percent in after-hours trading, to $108 a share.