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Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
Germany Oct 20, 2025 Country Members Virtual german
Die Realisierung des Potenzials von KI und datengesteuerten Strategien stellt nicht länger nur einen Wettbewerbsvorteil dar, sondern ist Heute auch entscheidend für den langfristigen Erfolg eines jeden Unternehmens. Unsere Wissensaustausch-Briefings "AI & Data Knowledge Transfer" zielen darauf ab, CIDOs und Senior Digital Leaders praktische Anwendungen aufzuzeigen und umsetzbaren Erkenntnissen von Fachexperten zu vermitteln, die den Weg für die transformative digitale Reise ebnen und beschleunigen.
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Belgium Oct 21, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
In today's competitive landscape, customer expectations have never been higher. They demand a personalised, seamless experience at every touchpoint, from initial marketing contact to post-sale service. Unified data is at the heart of creating engaging customer experiences and is meant to fuel the 360 profile. However, for many organizations, a complete picture of the customer is fragmented, with critical data scattered in disconnected systems and departments. This exclusive roundtable will bring together Digital Leaders active in multiple industries to discuss a critical challenge: breaking down data silos to build a true 360° view of the customer. We will explore how to solve the complex integration challenges that prevent a unified view, and how to transform disparate data into a single source of truth. Join us to: Discover how to overcome the technical hurdles of integrating critical business systems, such as ERP and CRM platforms, to unify customer data. Explore real-world case studies on how organisations have successfully created unified customer insights to enhance personalisation and boost commercial and operational efficiency. Discuss best practices for turning fragmented data into actionable insights that can anticipate customer needs, drive revenue growth, and foster long-term loyalty. This is a unique opportunity for Digital Leaders who are ready to transform their customer engagement strategy and unlock the full potential of their data.
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Spain Oct 22, 2025 Country Members Physical spanish
Descubre cómo las organizaciones están utilizando la tecnología para impactar en el negocio a través de casos reales de uso y aprendizajes clave en áreas como ciberseguridad, automatización o data, contados por los protagonistas. Un espacio diseñado para inspirarte, conectar con expertos y potenciar la innovación en tu organización.
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Belgium Oct 22, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
Enterprises are questioning whether private networks and stacked firewalls are still worthwhile investments. A newer approach operates on the open internet with Zero Trust, eliminates perimeter complexity, and reframes cybersecurity as a business performance metric for boards and audit committees. This is a closed-door, peer discussion, not a lecture. We’ll examine the promise and its pitfalls: Are the promised savings significant, or are they too good to be true? What risks do you introduce? How does this collide with your installed base, legacy OT, entrenched processes and team competencies, and how do you overcome that without breaking operations or credibility with the board? Two senior leaders from global companies will spark the dialogue with lived experience: Kurt De Ruwe, CIO AkzoNobel Frank Bolata, CIO Syensqo
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Poland Oct 23, 2025 Invitation Only Physical Polish
Cloud UP! ’25 to miejsce spotkań managerów, którzy chcą świadomie i skutecznie rozwijać swoje organizacje, wykorzystując najnowsze technologie. Nieformalnym hasłem tegorocznej edycji jest “Chmura gotowa na AI” - będziemy rozmawiać o tym, co sztuczna inteligencja naprawdę potrafi oraz pokazywać, jak wdrażać ją w praktyce. Wspólnie z ekspertami przeanalizujemy, jakie warunki muszą zostać spełnione, aby wdrożenia AI były zarówno skuteczne, jak i bezpieczne. Zerkniemy za kulisy najnowszych rodzimych produktów AI-owych, by zobaczyć ich możliwości, a także poznamy najciekawsze wdrożenia z wykorzystaniem Agentspace. Po raz kolejny spotkamy się w formule Share.Explore.Execute. Stawiamy na wymianę wiedzy i doświadczeń zdobytych podczas realizacji projektów. To one stanowią punkt wyjścia do odkrywania, testowania i skutecznej implementacji najlepszych rozwiązań w organizacjach. Cloud UP! ’25 to cztery ścieżki tematyczne, na które złożą się prezentacje, rozmowy, sesje live-demo oraz pogłębione dyskusje w formule roundtables: AI: Beyond the Hype Data Mastery Resilience & Regulatory Advanced Practitioners Dołącz do liderów chmurowych innowacji w Polsce i spotkaj się z nami już 23 października w Event Hall w Fabryce Norblina.
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Belgium Oct 23, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
How to lead responsibly when technology can deceive better than a human? AI’s ability to shape our perceptions and create new realities is becoming increasingly sophisticated. While it opens significant opportunities, it also carries risks. What happens when AI goes beyond data and algorithms to influence - or even deceive - our senses? How does this change not only our understanding of reality but also the foundations of trust, creativity, and truth in business? AI isn’t just transforming business, it is altering how we experience and interpret everything around us. From AI-generated deepfakes to personalised experiences designed to influence behaviour, the line between truth and illusion is increasingly blurred. This event combines a roundtable discussion among peers with a hands-on sensory workshop, where you will experience illusions through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Through these experiments, we will confront the ethical dilemmas that arise when AI has the power to fabricate realities and influence decisions.
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Discount Bank innovates faster to compete with start-ups
Due to the increasing number of young startups in Israel's financial market, Discount Bank had to shorten the time it takes to introduce new products and services. Stakeholders received a customized training program from Red Hat® Consulting. Read the details in this interesting customer case study.
With many young startups entering Israel’s financial market, Discount Bank needed to reduce
time-to-market for new products and services. The bank had to adopt a modern architecture to
remain a leader and stay competitive. Having realized that an approach based on microservices
and containers was the best approach, the bank adopted Red Hat OpenShift to ensure security
and scalability. Red Hat Consulting provided a bespoke training program for all stakeholders.
The new infrastructure built on Red Hat technology has reduced time-to-market, ensured
security, and allowed the bank to adopt FinOps innovation.
Competing with innovative young financial companies in parallel to the
traditional banks
The Discount Group is a global financial organization providing comprehensive corporate,
commercial, retail, and private banking services. It comprises banking, capital market and investment,
finance, and trust companies in and beyond Israel. In Israel, Discount Bank provides banking
services to more than one million private and corporate customers through a network of more
than 200 branches, business and investment centers, and direct, online, and mobile channels.
Israel is a country renowned for its innovation. As one of Israel’s leading financial institutions,
the bank needed to compete with the innovative young companies entering the market. “Israel is
a very competitive location,” said Asaf Goldfeld, Head of OpenShift and Linux at Discount Bank.
“The game for all the banks is to bring the best products to market in the shortest time.”
Discount Bank needed to move away from its legacy environment built on virtual machines to do
that. “There are a lot of start-ups in Israel,” said Guy Avrahami, Head of Infrastructure at Discount
Bank. “It’s very easy for them to innovate fast because they don’t have the legacy core applications
or environments we need to consider.”
To remain competitive, the bank needed to adapt its IT strategy. It began building a modern
infrastructure using an API (application programming interface) approach. But acquiring one
start-up opened its eyes to a whole new approach. “Pay Box, a digital wallet, was using an approach
based on containers and microservices,” said Avrahami. “We could see this approach was the future
and so decided to include it in our IT strategy.”
With its IT strategy now based on microservices and containers, the bank began its modernization
journey by designing and building pipelines to support a CI/CD (continuous integration and
continuous delivery) approach. As for the infrastructure, market research revealed Kubernetes
as the way forward. “We learned that Kubernetes is the next generation of platforms for running
containers,” said Avrahami. “But we found a lot of gaps between our governance and security
requirements and what the community version of Kubernetes could deliver. We needed a product.”
Adopting a modern architecture based on trusted technology
It was early days for Kubernetes in the financial market. “It was difficult to know what product
to select as we would be the first bank to adopt containers and microservices,” said Avrahami.
“We needed to close the gap around governance and security. We had previous experience with
Red Hat products and saw that Red Hat OpenShift would allow us to create a security
environment to meet our permission and authentication needs.”
Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh provides a uniform way to connect, manage, and observe
microservices-based applications and allows institutions to customize microservices security
to meet the complex security requirements with which all financial institutions must comply.
Red Hat Consulting built Discount Bank a tailor-made training program that included bespoke
workshops and access to self-paced training courses through Red Hat Learning Subscription.
These helped the bank prepare for working in its new architecture. “Containers, microservices,
and Red Hat OpenShift were all new to us,” said Avrahami. “Red Hat tailored our training to
educate all our teams so they would all understand, and all speak the same language.”
redhat.com Case study Discount Bank innovates faster to compete with start-ups 3
The program reached all departments—DevOps, development, design, application architecture,
and infrastructure—and helped them learn about the platform. An introduction day for C-level
executives helped them align their terminology with the technical teams.
With extensive training, the Discount Bank team built their new infrastructure-as-code environment
with help from a team of experts from Red Hat Consulting. “From the beginning, the bank was
open-minded, and the innovative architecture we built was challenging,” said Batel Assaf Volchek,
SA for the FSI Sector, Red Hat. “The bank invested a lot to build a flexible architecture secured and
scalable for future needs. Looking back, the first brick and the effort we invested together was one
of our keys for successful deployment.”
Having crafted the new IT strategy and brought it to life by adopting DevOps, building pipelines,
and implementing Red Hat OpenShift, the bank next needed to focus on adapting its organizational
culture to the new world.
Innovating faster with more efficient development, infrastructure,
and security
Reduced time-to-market to just days from one month
Discount Bank has met its goal with the new architecture based on microservices and containers
running on Red Hat OpenShift, significantly reducing time-to-market. “We can give our customers
the best solutions in the shortest time, and this is the big plus of our Red Hat OpenShift solution,”
said Avrahami. “Something that would have taken a month to deploy in our previous environments,
we can now deploy in a few days—or even a few hours.”
Moreover, developers no longer rely on the infrastructure team to create the environments
they need, allowing them to be much more efficient and launch new functionality much faster.
“We have projects launching hundreds of new services,” said Tom Porat, Full Stack Developer at
Discount Bank. “Most of that happens without any involvement from the infrastructure team.”
The bank can now deploy small developments and small changes to an application very quickly.
The development team is working on more projects than it would have previously. “Our developers
are providing more solutions for our customers—taking our service to the next level—with the same
number of people, or even fewer in some parts of the business,” said Porat.
Ensured security across clusters with standardization
The Red Hat OpenShift environment provides consistency across clusters, which is vital for ensuring
the bank’s new services meet its security and scalability requirements. Cluster images are audited
once and then stored in GitHub, ready to be duplicated across clusters.
“Our security team tests and certifies one Red Hat OpenShift cluster image for our infrastructure
team to then roll out many times,” said Goldfeld. “It saves our security team valuable time because
it doesn’t need to test an image for each cluster we provision.”
“The architecture Red Hat meticulously crafted not only facilitates the seamless deployment of an
end-to-end OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) but also ensures centralized management of these
clusters, regardless of the hosted infrastructure. This groundbreaking approach is underpinned by
an advanced GitOps process, providing a single source of truth,” said Almog Elfassy, Cloud Architect,
Red Hat.
redhat.com Case study Discount Bank innovates faster to compete with start-ups 4
From a developer’s perspective, he now has confidence in any environment stored in GitHub
because he knows it has been audited. “We can quickly create a new test environment to test a new
configuration or an upgrade and we know that it is exactly the same as the production environment,”
said Porat.
Allowed the bank to adopt FinOps innovations
Discount Bank can now easily take advantage of innovations from FinOps companies thanks to
Red Hat OpenShift. Small companies are approaching the bank with their novel ideas and asking
for a platform to run their containers.
“We can bring new FinOps applications into our banking in no time,” said Goldfeld. “We can adopt
their innovations in just a few days.”
It is now much easier for the bank to onboard anything new: “Once you have the capacity on the
cluster, you don’t need to request new servers,” said Porat. “You don’t need to get new IP addresses,
DNS, records, security, and everything else. Red Hat OpenShift reduces the friction when you
provision new things.”
Preparing the bank for the future
“We have brought innovation to our infrastructure by adopting Red Hat OpenShift,” said Porat. “We
also have GitHub and everything we need for our CI/CD pipeline. We are now onboarding more
applications and modernizing existing ones, so they work more efficiently.”
“Our IT strategy includes a chapter that says we are moving from virtual machines to containers and
microservices in the next five to ten years,” said Avrahami. “Our IT strategy also says we will move to
the cloud, which will be much easier with containers rather than virtual machines. Red Hat OpenShift
has an important role at Discount Bank, not just today but also for our future.”
“This collaborative effort highlights Red Hat’s commitment to developing innovative solutions
tailored to customers’ unique business objectives. Together, we aim to pave the way for the
successful realization of those objectives,” said Elfassy.
About Discount Bank
Discount Bank was founded in 1935 by the late Mr. Leon Recanati and is a part of the
Discount Group. The bank offers comprehensive banking services to its customers in all areas
of financial activity, through a network of 114 branches spread throughout Israel and through
direct banking services.
Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
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CIOFEST 2025 - From Order Taker to Proactive Disruptor
The role of the CIO has evolved from managing systems to shaping outcomes: growth, resilience, and competitive edge are now won or lost in the technology arena. Today ’ s CIOs must balance stability with innovation, control costs while attracting scarce talent, and modernise legacy infrastructure while adopting emerging technologies.
As AI transitions from a specialised tool to an all-pervasive force, understanding its profound implications for our human lives is no longer merely academic but an urgent imperative for social well-being and strategic preparedness.
Geopolitical tensions have dominated the headlines for over two years now. In this context, the cyber threat landscape is also evolving rapidly. The protection and security of critical infrastructure – both physical and digital – is becoming increasingly important.
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