Yesterday’s Talkflows in Stockholm took place high above the city — at the Frends office, where floor-to-ceiling windows opened onto a panoramic view of the winter skyline. The setting matched the spirit of the event: open, informal, and designed for conversation.
Two organizations took the stage to show what digital transformation looks like in practice. Not as a buzzword, but as a day-to-day operational necessity. Presto, one of Europe’s fastest-growing fire safety companies, and Fastighetsägarna Service, a leading real-estate services provider, walked the audience through the architectural challenges they faced, the legacy they inherited, and how modern integration and automation are now powering their growth.
Instead of glossy vendor slides or theoretical roadmaps, both companies shared candid stories about complexity, technical debt and the real impact of taking control of their system landscape. Their message was clear: integration is not a side topic. It is the backbone of business scalability.
Presto, specializing in fire safety, first aid, and training, has grown rapidly in recent years and now operates across seven countries. This fast-paced expansion and acquisition strategy created a need for an IT backbone capable of supporting long-term scalability.
When Jonathan Varli, Head of Product Development, joined the organization, the IT function was fully outsourced, and the integration landscape was complex. To establish control and transparency, the team developed an integration policy and conducted a structured procurement process.
The choice fell on Frends, thanks to its clarity and collaborative approach.
Instead of rebuilding everything from scratch, Presto adopted a sequential strategy: replacing systems one by one while centralizing all integrations on Frends. This provided better visibility, governance, and the ability to manage lifecycles and bottlenecks effectively.
By bringing integration development in-house, Presto achieved:
The most important insight? Stick to the strategy. As Jonathan puts it: “When introducing a new system or facing a new integration need, it’s crucial to follow the established integration strategy."
This ensures sustainability and scalability for the future.
Chief Digital Officer Jan Heggen and System Architect Milad Taba from Fastighetsägarna Service presented a different but equally challenging journey, one centered on dismantling a decade-old legacy system and rebuilding the company’s entire data flow.
For years, the organization relied on an aging property-management system. It was a classic black box: closed integrations, no transparency and an ever-growing amount of historical data that had simply been migrated forward.
As Jan described: “Black boxes are a legacy we all live with in some form.”
When the vendor later admitted they had “lost control of the release cycle and the program code,” Fastighetsägarna had no choice but to act.
The team launched a dual transformation:
They even included a Frends integration architect in the system procurement process to “pressure-test” vendors, in a move that ultimately narrowed the field from 50 property systems to just two capable of meeting all requirements.
Decades of accumulated customer, property and financial data needed to be untangled, evaluated, corrected or retired. Every day brought new decisions about how to treat inconsistent or outdated records.
In a time when AI is at the center of every business discussion, quality and reliable data become even more critical. AI, analytics, or automation cannot function if the foundation is unstable.
Jan summed it up memorably: “Ungroomed and undefined master data eats AI for breakfast.”
With the new business systems live and integrations unified under Frends, the next step is to replace the two remaining legacy data warehouses. Fastighetsägarna is now moving toward cloud data warehousing, with Frends orchestrating data ingestion and transformation.
The goal:
And in a room overlooking Stockholm, surrounded by peers facing similar challenges, the message resonated clearly: the path to innovation starts not with AI hype, but with integration done right.
Across industries and maturity levels, three patterns stood out:
1. Integration is now a strategic capability, not a technical afterthought.
Both organizations demonstrated that architecture determines agility.
2. Legacy systems silently accumulate risk until the business is forced to act.
From black-box systems to undocumented integrations, technical debt compounds over time.
3. Data quality is everything, especially in an AI era.
Without clean, governed master data, AI initiatives fail before they start.
4. Internal competence accelerates value.
Both companies invested in teams, processes, and ways of working—not just tools.
Talkflows is Frends’ industry gathering dedicated to integration-powered automation. Each edition brings together IT leaders, architects, and developers to share how they are turning smart integrations into real opportunities for optimization, efficiency, and growth. Split into public- and private-sector editions and hosted in a relaxed environment, Talkflows blends practical presentations with time to mingle, exchange experiences, and compare notes on what’s really happening inside modern IT landscapes.