Cloudflare and Oracle Build a Better Internet with OCI: Oracle CloudWorld 2024

Now we're going to talk with a company that in some ways shares a legacy with us, because we're going to speak to a customer with the ambitious goal of building a better Internet with focus on security, performance, resilience, and privacy. Sound familiar? Let's hear from Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is the leading connectivity cloud company on a mission to help build a better Internet. Powered by one of the world's largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. Trusted by millions of organizations, from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses, to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe, Cloudflare helps connect, protect, and build everywhere, giving customers, customers, the control they need to accelerate their business. Please welcome to the stage Michelle Zatlin.

Great. It's very exciting here to have a younger technology company, not one 47 years old like that. Not yet, anyway. Not yet, not yet, not yet. And I know you have many customers in the room, but not every one of them is one of your customers. So why don't we take a minute to really introduce Cloudflare to this entire room?

Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. It's such a privilege. Hi, everyone, I'm Michelle. I'm one of the founders of a company called Cloudflare, and we call ourselves a connectivity cloud. What does that mean? Well, actually, we're hearing about so many businesses today that are moving from how they used to do business to a more modern world. And some of it's on premise, some of it's in the cloud. You need something to connect all of that somewhere where to control your security, somewhere to think about performance, somewhere to think about privacy for your users and employees. And, of course, resilience. And that's really the connectivity cloud. That's what Cloudflare offers. We work with businesses, both small and large around the world to ensure that their applications are protected, their employees are protected with our Zero Trust platform, and that they're enabled to do whatever they need to do in this modern world. A little bit of a fun fact. Yesterday we stopped 157 billion with the B cyber attacks on behalf of all of our customers. We work with millions of businesses around the world. That means, if you do the math, about 100 million cyber attacks, we help stop automatically without any human intervention since I walked on stage. And I think that is the power of modern technology today. And what's left to be done?

Well, and I can tell you one thing, it's not getting safer out there. And so More and more responsibility falls on companies like you and us. And I think one of the things. Excuse me, that means a lot. I'm sorry, guys.

You've been doing great. You've been going nonstop and it's been an entertaining show.

Thank you. Very fun for me. I apologize. Well, for us, as I mentioned, we're always thrilled when a customer picks us, always. But when it's a really technical, really good expert in a field, when they pick us, it means even more. It really makes us want and really want to share that. Would you mind sharing a little bit about why you picked OCI and some of the benefits you've seen?

Absolutely. Well, you know, one of the best parts of my job is I get to work with companies around the world. And one thing that keeps coming up more and more is I see so many more companies choosing oci and I think it's for so many different reasons. All the things that you've been talking about today, the built for performance, the security posture, how Oracle has this huge legacy, but you're just so modern. And I think one thing that has not come up since I've been on stage is how innovative Oracle has been and how innovative the OCI team is bringing new ideas to the market for their customers. Of course you want to be all the I's dotted and t's, crossed for customers like the CIA, but you also want to be nimble and agile in this very dynamic world where things are moving all the time. And so one thing that I see with companies is about over 50% of companies today have a multi cloud setup and it's only increasing by the week. Five years ago that was not the case. Five years ago the state of affairs was, hey, I'm going to pick one cloud, I'm going to go on and on one cloud. That's just not realistic. And so in this multi cloud world, you want to be able to mix and match the best features depending on the on the cloud provider. And again, I think OCI is just out there doing so much in the marketplace. Last thing I'll just say, which I think is really interesting and is becoming more important in this next inning of operating in today's modern world is how, how you describe yourself as priced price for performance, which I think is really important. We are all, every business is under pressure to say, hey, how do I do things more efficiently so I can go take those savings and reinvest back in other parts of our business, whether it's AI or building products for our customers. And so I think Those are some of the things that we've really seen both at cloudflare, but more broadly in the industry, about why more businesses are moving to oci.

Well, thank you. That is really very, very kind. I will tell you that I feel like we very much share this of common mission, multi cloud, giving our customers choice, thinking about security all the time, and especially in security in multi cloud. Maybe you could share with this group a little bit of some of the innovative things you're doing in that exact area.

Yes, thank you. Well, in this world now we're in this place where, okay, I am working with multiple clouds. I have some things maybe on premise still, but then there's these places where I have different workloads running in different places. How do I stitch it all together? Well, this is again where you need a connectivity cloud. So you have one integrated platform to have this security posture and visibility. It's a way to kind of add simplicity to what's going on in the background, where it's like, you don't have to move everything on the background yet, but you can have this layer of security sitting in front to say, okay, I want to make sure I'm protected from the latest attack. I want to make sure everything is fast. Whether my customer is coming from Santiago, Chile, which is, I know where your next customer is from, or if they're in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, you want to make sure that it's fast and snappy because we all have customers and eyeballs all around the world. And it's really this idea of being the power of being connected globally, but also the power of running your business locally. And I think that that's really where it's interesting to see this new modern day where businesses have to operate in to see which organizations are partnering together. Because it's not just one company that's going to offer all of this. You have to partner. And I think it's been amazing working with Oracle in this way of saying, hey, let's partner to bring it better, make it better for end customers around the world and really enable all these businesses to say, let me pick and choose the best, best of any world.

I need see, again, the focus on the customer, the focus on partnering, that is the new reality and that is what leads to success. When I think about some of the things you're doing, I mean, you are growing so fast, you are moving forward. Maybe you could share a little bit about what's next for cloudflare.

I'd love to. Well, you know, you said focus on customers. We are also intensely focused on customers. I could not agree more. Customers and partnering is really, those are the two key words in today's, in how to do business today. And so when we think about our customers, we're thinking about, okay, where are they working and how are they working? And so with the where it's interesting. So the world is, there's so many multinational national businesses in this room. So if you just look at countries around the world, 71% have passed a data localization law in the last three years. 71% of countries, excuse me, and there's another about 10% that are about to pass laws. So you might be the best at running a business, a multinational business, but you might not be the best at keeping up with the public private, like the public policy of what's going on around the world. So there's just a lot happening in data localization and privacy. And so for the, where we work for our customers, we're saying Cloudflare runs a global network. We're in over 120 countries, we're in 330 cities around the world. We're, how do you meet your, your data privacy local laws while still being global? I know that's something we really share with Oracle and that we, we, we enable this together. And that's something that more businesses need every day because they want to be global but meet their local needs. On the how people work. I mean, it's been about seven minutes since the word AI has come up. So let's make sure we touch on it one last time. It's, it's, if you cannot be in business today, thinking about, okay, how are we going to use gen AI, how to make my business more efficient. And I think it's incredible what OCI is offering to be where you run your models and do all the training. The piece of AI that's really interesting is where are you going to do the inference? And of course, on the end devices, the best, the mobile device, the laptop, that's the best. But there are going to be certain things where there's not quite enough space on the phone or the device to do it. You need another place. And that's where Cloudflare is globally distributed network to do inference at the edge. And so we're really excited. We have something called workers AI where developers can be building, where they can use your training sets and your models at Oracle. But then the AI inference on the Cloudflare edge and I cannot wait to see what everyone in this room builds with that because that is the future, and it's gonna make our businesses better and make the society move forward.

Absolutely. Could not have said it better myself. Thank you. Thank you. Michelle, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you.