In this topic I would like to talk about things that are available for Enterprise customers but are “hidden” from rest of community and Cloudflare Partners.
For starters I would like to say that I may be mistaken and actually there are all data about things I would like to know but I didn’t find it (Cloudflare is changing all the time and I might have missed something).
So the company I work for is Cloudflare Optimized Partner. I believe that right now we manage several hundred (if not over thousand) different domains and we put only several dozen of them on Cloudflare (due to different reasons/needs).
The thing is that when we present Cloudflare possibilities to bigger client I have very little knowledge about what’s available for Enterprise users. When I started to read this community forums it feels like Enterprise has a lot of different services (counting these in beta phase) that not everyone know of.
Lately we have more clients that are quite specific about their needs and I’m afraid that there might be something in Enterprise account level that I’m not aware of therefore I just tell client things like “that is not possible on Cloudflare” when in reality it is possible with Enterprise and feature is in beta phase. Our clients still might be interested in such things even if they are in beta phases.
To end with simple question. Is it possible to let (at least) Cloudflare Partners know about things that are available for Enterprise customers but are “hidden” from general community (due to different reasons)?
@komarEX good question. I’m actually a solutions engineer for the partners team so I deal with a broad spectrum of partners (hosting, traditional reseller, Vars, MSPs, etc).
There’s not an Enterprise Customer specific Help Center today. I think there has been some discussion of the topic in the past, but at Cloudflare we do try to make as many features as possible available across all plans (including free) with some potential variation in terms of total features (for example in load balancing the number of pools, origins and polling frequency is larger than in other plans), and we often roll out new features to enterprise customers first… though for both rate limiting and load balancing we had a broad open beta, and a great participation rate across plans.
As part of my role as a solutions engineer I am looking for ways to more broadly engage with partners to help better enable them to support, sell and create value added services to augment what Cloudflare provides. I’m working to do that with my team and hope to have news on that front soon(ish).
One of the advantages to ENT customers is they get a named technical resource (if they’re unlucky it’s me). That means we’ll often help the customer (or partner) to fine tune and tweak Cloudflare settings or analyze traffic to identify bottlenecks or design issues that a customer may want to consider, and we’ll touch base regularly to discuss how new features we’ve released might be useful or trends that we’re seeing in the industry.
They also get a higher priority support queue (usually staffed by the same great support team we have looking at all our tickets).
Beyond that Enterprise Plan Overview is pretty comprehensive. The one thing I don’t think it mentions is what we call ESC (Edge Side Code) which can allow us to do some unique functionality at our edge. Certainly not used by all our customers, but if you have something you don’t think we can do our team is always happy to discuss.
As far as I remember you had to “ask for access” to these features and so we did for one of our clients and if I remember correctly we were never given that access and when these features just opened for everyone then we could use it (not before that).
Now back to the topic. Then I will try to rephrase my question in different manner. Assuming that Enterprise plan has everything I would like to see can we just make it possible for Partners to ask for something like demo/test account so I can see for myself how things works in Enterprise “world” here in Cloudflare?
Right now my whole knowledge about Enterprise plan is limited to whatever is written on site. I have no experience whatsoever around this topic and I’m pretty sure that my company won’t pay $2000 or so just for me to test how things works in Enterprise level of account.
Essentially right now I’m asking for free access (as a Partner) to Enterprise level of account so I can take a first hand experience how things works there and what’s can be done.
So what’s there for you? Well, if I educate myself in this field then I can better describe Enterprise account for my company’s clients. Therefore you get more chances to get more money because they may use Enterprise account instead of Business one.
Win-win situation from my point of view. I have better understanding of your services and you have more possibilities to get Enterprise clients. And it doesn’t cost you a penny.
Fair enough on the beta, we had to do some education on what did and didn’t work and look for unique use cases. We also reached the end of the open enrollment period and should have really changed the link to “Notify me when this feature is available” instead of “Request access” once the candidate pool was full. An opportunity for improvement on our part and I’ll feed that to the next team which opens up a beta like that.
As for an ENT test account; I’m happy to enable a 30 day one for our partners for a test domain, just shoot me an email at (myusername)@Cloudflare.com and we can connect up to discuss the details. A better process for managing partner access to ENT test accounts is on the list of projects for my team, it’s just uh… not as high on the list as some other much needed improvements.
For some reason I don’t see a button to send you a private message so let’s say that first e-mail with “secret password AeNg4asei5eewoh3hiuj” is actually me
