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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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Volkswagen supports computer-aided engineering with a modern operating system
To simplify operating system management, Volkswagen migrated from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations. Now close to 1,000 engineers in Volkswagen R&D now use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for computer-aided engineering (CAE) to support the latest professional graphics processing units (GPUs) and access the high volumes of memory.
To simplify operating system management for its research and development (R&D) engineers, Volkswagen migrated from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations, a stable, supported platform for resource- and graphics-intensive workloads, such as aerodynamics analysis and crash test simulations. Close to 1,000 engineers in Volkswagen R&D now use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for computer-aided engineering (CAE) to support the latest professional graphics processing units (GPUs) and access the high volumes of memory needed for powerful processing. Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux also helps the automaker’s third-party vendors ensure their software is compatible and certified to meet Volkwagen’s security and performance needs.
At German automotive manufacturer Volkswagen, research and development (R&D) engineers rely on computer-aided engineering (CAE) for many of their tasks, from analyzing aerodynamics during vehicle development to simulating the impact of a collision. These tasks require powerful workstations to run analytics and provide graphical outputs.
“CAE replaced pen, pencil, and calculator for engineering calculations. In addition, running physical crash tests with real cars that were very costly was time-consuming, because you had to build a new car for each test. With CAE, you can run a crash simulation on your workstation, then analyze the data to inform design improvements, ” said Gunther Mayer, Integration Specialist, CAE-Integration, R&D, Volkswagen.
In the early days of CAE, Volkswagen’s team of around 300 R&D engineers ran their simulations on a variety of UNIX desktops—including Silicon Graphics (SGI) IRIX, IBM AIX, Oracle Solaris, and HP-UX—as well as CAE products and tools from close to 100 vendors. These vendors used a variety of Linux distributions, making quality control and assurance more difficult.
As simulations became more advanced, however, this complexity affected productivity. Volkswagen sought a solution that would provide more robust workstation capabilities.
“Over time, crash test models have become more detailed. Today, photorealistic simulations show what happens inside the car in very fine detail,” said Mayer. “Good graphics are required and in turn, hardware acceleration and reliability. We needed a 64-bit operating system with enterprise support.”
After exploring potential operating systems, including 64-bit Microsoft Windows, Volkswagen’s R&D engineering team chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations, a version optimized for high-performance, graphically intensive workloads like CAE.
“We decided early to standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it was stable and offered commercial support,” said Mayer. “Security updates were built in, and we could call Red Hat or raise a ticket if there was an issue. It also has a long lifecycle, like many of our automotive applications, so we could easily keep any legacy version up to date for our engineers to run two - or even five-year-old applications if needed.”
Volkswagen migrated 300 workstations, as well as tools and applications, from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to support various processes across a range of departments, from crash simulations to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for aerodynamics testing. In the years since its initial deployment, more than 1,000 engineers in Volkswagen R&D now use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations.
A Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) provides consistent, ongoing support for the company’s CAE Linux client team, such as collaborative troubleshooting sessions using a screen-sharing approach for complex challenges. “Talking to an expert is far better than learning ourselves through errors. We just explain what we want to do, and our TAM shows us different approaches and their advantages and disadvantages,” said Mayer.
Support for large amounts of RAM was a deciding factor in Volkswagen R&D’s choice of an operating system—and remains important as processing and other needs change. Its engineers needed an operating system that supported not only powerful CPUs from Intel and AMD but also large amounts of memory. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations devices that Volkswagen R&D runs today offer a massive 768 GB of RAM.
“We always use the latest and greatest hardware, including the latest professional GPUs,” said Mayer. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstation can meet the demands of those new components. The 64-bit Windows workstations lacked the memory needed for our simulations’ OpenGL [Open Graphics Library] graphics.”
To ensure compatibility of all of the third-party software products used by its engineers, Volkswagen R&D set up a workgroup with other industry contributors and automotive software providers to standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
“Because we need reliable, production-ready technology, we now only install software from vendors who have tested and certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Mayer. “Many of them were already running in our UNIX environment, so it was fairly easy for them to port their software and work with Red Hat to gain certification. The certification program is important for our R&D work.”
Focusing on a single Linux distribution avoids duplication of efforts to prepare different versions for different vendors, but also makes troubleshooting faster and easier.
“By uniting on one stable, supported Linux distribution, we know we can work together internally and with our vendors to replicate and resolve any issues,” said Oliver Langner, Application Manager, Group IT, Volkswagen.
Initially, Volkswagen’s IT department worried about the security quality of using a Linux distribution, but the R&D team quickly demonstrated how Red Hat Enterprise Linux helped them meet all security compliance requirements.
“Red Hat provides confirmed security patches for any bugs or vulnerabilities that we can apply quickly,” said Mayer. “Then Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations lets us send the IT department a complete list of all of the security patches installed for faster verification.”
The R&D team’s success with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations has attracted new users at Volkswagen, including software developers who have added various Python tools and packages and Group Innovation, a user group developing artificial intelligence (AI) data models.
Volkswagen continues exploring new versions of the operating system as they are introduced, including some initial migrations from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to version 8 and starting to build a version 9 client image, to take advantage of the latest features and enhancements.
“Going forward, we see the adoption of a unified CAE Linux client based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations across other brands within the Volkswagen Group, such as our server department, as well as externally with software vendors,” said Langner.
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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