CXO MovesLeadership & Strategy
Cloudflare Appoints Christian Smith as President of Revenue

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Cloudflare has appointed Christian Smith as President of Revenue, bringing in a technology industry veteran with more than 30 years of experience scaling enterprise sales organisations and leading global go-to-market transformations. Smith will oversee the company's worldwide go-to-market organisation, including global sales and revenue operations, as Cloudflare advances its next phase of growth.
His appointment comes as Cloudflare pursues an ambitious goal of scaling its annual recurring revenue (ARR) to $5 billion and beyond. The company is looking to build on its growing enterprise business and expand the commercial reach of its connectivity cloud platform.
Bringing experience from Splunk's revenue transformation
Smith joins Cloudflare with a track record of leading commercial organisations through significant business and technology transitions.
Most recently, he served as an Operating Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), where he advised executive teams at high-growth technology companies on business strategy and growth.
Before joining TCV, Smith was Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at Splunk. He led the company's global go-to-market organisation through a major business-model transformation, shifting from traditional on-premises perpetual licensing towards cloud-based and recurring revenue models. During his tenure, Splunk scaled its annual recurring revenue to more than $4 billion.
Following Cisco's acquisition of Splunk, Smith was responsible for Splunk's worldwide commercial business at Cisco, overseeing global sales, renewals, sales engineering, partnerships and strategic alliances.
His earlier career includes serving as Chief Revenue Officer at Nintex and holding senior leadership positions at Oracle, ATG and Daptiv. Across these roles, he has worked with different enterprise sales models, including direct sales, strategic channel partnerships and product-led growth.
Smith also brings board-level experience, currently serving on the boards of Atlassian and Feedzai, while acting as a board advisor to Axonius and an Executive Advisor to TCV.
Leading Cloudflare's next phase of commercial growth
At Cloudflare, Smith will be responsible for aligning the company's global sales and revenue operations with its broader growth ambitions.
The appointment comes at an important stage in Cloudflare's development as demand grows for technologies supporting application security, network connectivity, cloud infrastructure and developer platforms. Its unified connectivity cloud platform brings these capabilities together, serving organisations ranging from small businesses to large enterprises.
Smith's experience at Splunk is particularly relevant to this next phase. Having led a global commercial organisation through a transition towards recurring cloud revenue, he brings experience in scaling enterprise sales, strengthening partner ecosystems and aligning commercial execution with evolving customer requirements.
Cloudflare CEO and Co-founder Matthew Prince highlighted Smith's ability to lead global go-to-market organisations through periods of rapid expansion, pointing to his operational discipline and customer focus as important strengths for the company's next chapter.
Smith succeeds Mark Anderson, who served as Cloudflare's President of Revenue from 2024. Anderson, who previously announced his retirement from his full-time role at the end of 2026, will remain with the company in an advisory capacity through December to support the leadership transition.
Connecting commercial execution with Cloudflare's growth ambitions
The leadership change comes alongside strong business momentum for Cloudflare. In its third-quarter 2026 results, the company reported revenue of $782.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 39%. It also added more than 158,000 paying customers during the quarter and reported continued expansion across its larger customer segments.
For Smith, the immediate opportunity will be to build on this momentum by strengthening enterprise go-to-market execution, accelerating commercial growth and expanding the company's global customer and partner relationships.
In his first remarks as President of Revenue, Smith pointed to Cloudflare's network scale, product innovation and the opportunity ahead for the company. He also emphasised his priorities around strengthening go-to-market execution, accelerating enterprise momentum and helping customers realise value from the platform more quickly.
His appointment reflects the growing importance of experienced revenue leadership as technology companies scale complex cloud and enterprise platforms. At Cloudflare, the focus will be on translating its technology and market opportunity into sustained commercial growth.
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. is a global connectivity cloud company that helps organisations make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure. Its platform brings together cloud-native connectivity, cybersecurity, performance and developer services, helping businesses reduce complexity and improve the reliability of their digital operations. Cloudflare serves millions of organisations worldwide, from entrepreneurs and small businesses to large enterprises, governments and nonprofit organisations.
Source: Cloudflare official announcement