Customer Panel: Bridging Tech & Experience | Cloudflare Immerse Stockholm 2026

All right. Excellent. Uh so very happy to to be here with all of you and all of you obviously and uh we're at the time in the program where apparently it's Dutch hour. So thank you Christian for super preceding us. Um no so I I think to be introduction was was spot on. Right. We're here on stage with uh our customers, our partners uh to talk about their use cases. And for Cloudflare, it's incredibly important to to hear these stories. Um obviously we build a platform, but we can imagine all the cool stuff that you do with it. Um and so taking that as inspiration uh today I think it it would be nice to understand you know your organizations what you do with it um uh how you deal with the current challenges that you see and what you see as future paths going forward uh and what that looks like for your organizations. Uh so without further ado, maybe you can start with brief introductions of yourselves and then we will dive into your organizations a little bit next. Is that okay? Sounds good. Excellent. Yeah. So my name is Eric Sebastian Randberg. Um I work for Intility which is a Norwegian managed service provider and uh I am the head of application platform services. Yes, Parlind. I work for Bon News, one of the leading news companies in the New Dec work as a chief architect and also part of our infrastructure team. My name is Ing. I'm the head of infrastructure in Varner that is a retail fashion company. Excellent. So, thank you. Maybe you could start uh with with Varner. So, what is Varner and uh No, how do you use technology? Yeah, Barney as I mentioned is a retail fashion company. We have eight different brands that is both competing with each other and supplemental and we have,00 stores in the Nordic and we have uh uh ecom operations in 10 different markets and uh we have been a cloudflare customers for many years. We started with uh the networking and CDN functionality to protect the website and we were quite early also with boot protections because we had uh tailor made boots that was directly going to our sites for look for bargains and shop limited edition products. So uh one one funny part to uh actually fight against and to find a solution around and uh now we are building uh a new ecom stack and we are trying to get everything running or the web shop itself and the back end for front end running that on uh open next on cloudflare. Awesome. I think there might be some similarities in with your situation pair from a bot management perspective. So can you talk a bit about Boner and how you uh use Cloudflare? Yes, sure. So Boner news we we're um like many many small companies in a company where I have around 200 brands like dog, express and dog industry. So a lot of big sites but we also have a lot of offices local offices or like 200 sites in uh the Nordics mainly. And we started our cloud cloudflare journey maybe a little different in that way that we we started by replacing our uh legacy VPN solution and going for the the zero trust and the the cloud pro salsa platform. Excellent. uh Eric's question uh from a partner perspective what does Intility do and how do you use Cloudflare? Yeah, so as uh I mentioned we are a managed service provider and what makes us different is that uh our model is built around a shared industrialized technology platform. So what we provide to our customers is the digital foundation and this includes for example cloud network security workplace technology and uh so on and we kind of help our customers with uh both running and developing and securing their IT environment end to end on our platform and we do this with a subscription model. So all of our customers kind of benefit from a continuously developing platform and uh continuous improvements. Um so they don't just buy it operations, they also get this evolving platform with uh which is all also added on new services at all time and we started with the cloudware for about four or five years ago. we saw kind of a shift in the geopolitical picture um where we saw bigger threats towards our platform. So it was actually our security department which contacted me and said okay so we see this going on uh could you please find a solution to make the platform more robust. So we started uh looking at alternatives and partnered up with Cloudflare and started with the layer 7 uh security with w and bot management etc. uh where we now are standardizing and using that technology for protecting our customers uh web applications. Excellent. So security then is is a very important use case for for Cloudflare but for traversing the internet in general I would say and P you mentioned you started out with with Sassy. Can you elaborate a bit on that journey and what were important criteria for you? Yeah, we uh one of the challenges we have now is that uh the media business is kind of consolidating. So we do a lot of merges, partnership expansion and this has been like a quite big load on doing just integration. So we wanted a solution where we could easily and faster connect different businesses and different yeah security parameters basically and have a really granular access and that was one thing that we could get out of this platform. At the same time, we could got the like scalability and the whole thing not needing to patch infrastructure anymore and all that. Uh so that's mergers and acquisitions combined with the operational efficiency of the platform that that made that did it for you essentially. Yeah. Yeah. And also one another another really interesting part that I find is that we everything was ready as you say you're doing API first. So we could build everything as the infrastructure as code right from the beginning and that was something that was when we looked at the market that wasn't that was kind of hard to find a provider for this kind of product that supported that scenario. So that was also something really nice that we could could get from the beginning. Now when we did a like green field installation maybe to give the audience some idea h how many acquisitions do you do on a regular basis I would say maybe a monthly integration it as always with this acquisitions it's a bit secret secrecy in them so can be zero and then it comes a bunch of them and then it goes up and down so it's uh really hard to predict in that way but yeah but when it comes you need to move quickly. Yeah as always the business wants to get started. Yeah right away. Yeah I know absolutely so that's challenging in some parts as as at keeping the security in the same at the same time as being fast and I imagine uh you're bringing a lot of customers into the platform as well. Uh what were your considerations for for taking on Cloudflare? Yeah, it was several reasons for so I would say that there are three criterias that kind of um define why we choose cloud player and one of them is kind of the global scale as well as all the security capabilities which is built into the platform and also the programmability because we like to standardize as much as possible in the infrastructure layer. So with Cloudflare we can use the APIs to kind of have consistency across all customers. So I would say that these are the kind of primary criteras for uh for going with that solution. Uh so you you spoke a bit about you know the uh changing landscape within Varner. Um so what are the challenges that you're currently coping with and uh what is it what what's I guess that we are having many of the challenges that uh the rest of us with uh more and more s applications that s applications that they need to protect and uh all new application that we're building building on top of headless technology. So it's more and more uh integration that you're doing and uh like it was mentioned earlier vibe coding building new applications internally. So and the understanding in the business regarding what is business continuity versus the need of new features and new applications. That's awesome. So can you elaborate a bit on why you're vibe coding and how you're applying that to your business? Um it's still very early but we have a not a lot of knowledge about all of the customers that we're having and uh uh we need to find the right products and we need to use technology to help us to move faster because everything is moving faster and uh many of the business users they have much more knowledge regarding what they really want to achieve. So instead of them trying to tell the technology department that we need an application that is doing the following it's a lot of jumping back and forth and we are seeing now just by giving the possibility to just discuss with an AI boot that is helping them out in that process makes it much more easy to actually build an enterprise ready application at the end. So in some cases it's building it for themsel but in other cases it will be just a framework that they they want what they want us to want to see that is being delivered at that end right and so by democratizing that capability you essentially speed up your go to market. Yeah. Fantastic. Oh really cool. any do you all vibe code nowadays or is that still maybe a bit too far? No, but I I've been using it for for a few months now and it's uh yeah, it's really nice. It's nice to be able to do it, right? like Valerie showed on stage, everyone can do it nowadays and uh feels like it waking up something that when you did programming long time back and when you've lost it a little bit along the way now doing other stuff but now you can like get back at the wheel a little bit without knowing all the bits and bites of the latest languages and the frameworks and so on. So it's a fun thing. Good. Uh so next question from a uh from a service provider perspective, right? So how are you um enabling your customers uh to to do these things? Is that is that something that's on your radar uh regarding WEB coding uh or or building in general? Yeah. Yeah. So uh there are many perspectives to kind of take into account. Um for example when it comes to challenges we also see kind of much the same as uh P here. Um he's doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions. We have customers doing mergers and acquisitions and uh we also have a global scale in terms of users. Um we see that users and applications are getting more and more distributed which is something we also have to take care of. So from starting with kind of the uh layer 7 protection of web application, we also started looking into kind of the saucy portfolio of uh products. Um so from kind of a situation we were having this kind of more traditional um take on how um users were going to have access to applications. We are looking to kind of have a more modern approach where we don't any longer kind of back hole the traffic through our data centers with traditional VPN and now using more of saucy technology to kind of only route the users direct more directly to uh to the origin and the applications they are kind of uh consuming. Excellent. So that that will save a lot of u bandwidth speed up the process and make your customers happier. Yes, of course. So, there's a latency part of it and uh Intility doesn't have to kind of build uh VPN concentrators all over the world and also there's a part of it related to kind of privileged access as well because more and more things are getting connected to the internet devices everywhere and we have customers within all types of businesses. So we are trying to kind of build a platform solution where where our customers may have third parties who need access to kind of these distributed devices and trying to have one unified platform to kind of provide that type of access and using cloudfare zero trust for for that part. Excellent. Good. Uh so so bear you uh Boner is obviously a media company. Um can you talk a bit about how is how is the business challenged right now by what's happening online? Yeah, there's of course now a bit of a challenge to whole how the whole business model works. I think here in the Nordics we're a bit spared from that as we don't depend as much on clicks and uh the advertisement uh parts as our US colleagues has um yeah a lot of the like advertisement uh revenues have been from goo steering traffic from Google getting clicks to your sites delivering ads and now now when users they type some something into Google and then they will get an AI summary first and you get zero traffic basically to your site. So that's but it's not we're not that affected with that in the Nordics yet. We have a quite strong relationship with our customers, quite a lot of direct traffic and our subscription model is increasing but um it's interesting to see how that's going to evolve and how we can like still deliver this AI experience for sure in some kind of way. Oh, absolutely. Is that something that you recognize as well for your business? uh yes of course but uh since uh advertising in Google and other media is quite essential for us but uh that is one of the things that we're following quite closely regarding where is the traffic coming from and uh there is some great examples regarding the data that is available in cloudfare also regarding uh how the traffic is being rooted in but uh of course there's a combination since we're working closely with Google also regarding since I guess that that is the most visited site that everybody's going on. So, uh to make sure that it's very easy to be seen there and also regarding your mentioning that uh the gym nice search at the top to be relevant and uh get your content there. I can imagine it being interesting now when you start to prompt for products and how to like get into that part of AIS to get recommendations to the correct Yeah. And that's something that we're working closely on how to actually feed the search engines with uh MCPS or whatever that is agent to agent communication. Excellent. But it feels like there's many moving parts uh in the internet right now is going to affect how you do your business, how your business essentially evolves over the next coming maybe months. No. Yeah. But you're also saying that um especially we are seeing that uh customers actually want to visit a site. They just don't want to have the AI answer. It's like we are seeing with the stores. People are coming to the stores. They want to go to the stores. So we're saying that uh to having the humanto human interaction and not just getting the answer. Sometimes you're shopping for a specific product but uh most of us is we need a new jacket or a new trouser or something then we want to have the inspirations. Absolutely. It's it's it's something that we tend to forget when we're in technology, but you know, it's the people that we do it for, right? And so they they still come uh regardless of whatever it was the LLM suggested to them. Yeah. But it's important that you are creating content and you're creating content also for LMS that you need to be seen and uh it requires more work from the teams that are working on making sure that uh we have all of the data available and that we are making it available make it easy for all search engines to find the content. Absolutely omni channel strategy essentially that's the fundamentals that uh you need to be available in every channel. All right. So looking at the future then where where do you see this uh end up how do you see the future going? uh everything will continue to go much faster but uh like you mentioned that you were replacing it because of the number of patching and we are seeing that uh we are already seeing when we are using AI tools that uh we are discovering more errors but we're fixing more in the beginning and that's very good but we're also seeing that uh um also the bad guys is also using the same tools to try to find uh the weakest link and to find a way in and to cover both business logic and the technical platform. Uh we need to move much more faster to find solution and create tools for it. Right. So the the entire vulnerability storm narrative that we get from the uh frontier models is definitely affecting you already. Yes. Excellent. How do you see that pair? Yeah, it's something we see now. I mean the the number of patches and CVS now that are being released all the times in all the big products from all the big vendors it's uh it's skyrocketing and uh we're getting to a point I think where it's it's going to be hard to keep up with the patches and not breaking running infrastructure. I think someone said that it might be worse to deploy a badly tested patch or fix than actually having the vulnerability there. So I think there's coming to an interesting balance where we must like make sure that maybe maybe it has to be okay to have a security vulnerability in the infrastructure but making sure that it's so isolated so it's so it doesn't impact that much. Yeah, like there's obviously a difference between a vulnerability and an exploitable vulnerability and there's a a kill chain that you want to prepare for as well. Um, but definitely it's it's it's something that many organizations will be looking at going forward. Uh, and how these uh AI agents will, you know, travel across the internet finding vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Um from your perspective then what what does your future like and does this kind of stuff come up for Intility as well? Absolutely. We also manage applications so we need to take account vulnerabilities and the other thing we see is that um the merging of kind of application delivery network AI and so on. uh as well as kind of our customers IT environment being becoming more and more distributed and our customers are connecting more and more things and devices to the internet and as well as being kind of more and more demanding when it comes to security and resilience and also AI I think will kind of accelerate the need for um governed and secure access to applications data and uh and IT environments. So the way we are going to cope with it I think is kind of just build more and more security and resilience into the platform so we get standardization across the environments for our customers and kind of try to bring the security closer to the users um to um to Yeah. Absolutely. I I think the architectural approach is uh is is right. We don't want to be patching uh band-aids all across our infrastructure, but rather taking that platform approach is is is really good in terms of keeping up to date. Um I but it feels like you know there's many moving parts. There's there's a lot of work that comes out of this for for everyone as well. uh and to a certain extent there is some dread or fear for what AI might bring both from our to our business perspectives as well as to our security practices. One final word from all of you on this. So are we optimistic or pessimistic about the future? And we can philosophy uh we do a bit of philosophy on this one and you want to go first. You need to be optimistic. There is a lot of challenges but uh we need to find a way to move forward and to utilize of the features that is actually being developed and what's available right fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. I agree to to be able to handle this and work on it. We need to stay optimistic and seeing that like all the technology now also makes like handling this stuff easier. So it's uh goes back and forth. Yeah, the opportunities are larger than ever before. So as the other guys are mentioning, I think we need to be optimistic about it. I think we will find solutions to kind of cope with the extra kind of parameters we need to kind of take care of when it comes to uh MCPS and AI. So um yeah, the future is bright. Absolutely. And so whenever we we as a humanity have faced a challenge, we've always risen to it and found solutions. And I'm I'm pretty sure that we'll see that for the free and open internet as well. Uh as long as we keep in mind that, you know, it's people that we do it for and never lose track of that. And I feel that's really important going forwards uh also in the agentic era. Good. Any final comments, questions? Uh, then I think we're at time and I'd like to thank you very much.