.jpg)
Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
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.
Read More
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.
Read More.jpg)
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
Read More
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.
Read More.jpg)
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.
Read More
Germany Oct 23, 2025 Country Members Physical german
Längst ist klar: Die KI-Transformation im Unternehmen beginnt mit der richtigen Dateninfrastruktur. Auf dem Weg zu einer “Enterprise AI-Engine”, in der Unternehmen KI für die eigenen Daten effizient nutzbar machen, müssen bewährte Fundamentals jedoch nicht gleich über Bord geworfen werden. Der CIO im Zentrum eines strategischen Transformationsprozesses sollte vor allem die richtige Balance zwischen Bestand und Innovation finden. Die zentrale Frage lautet daher: Wie lassen sich modernste KI-Technologien in hybriden Umgebungen nutzen, wenn viele Daten noch in gewachsener Infrastruktur liegen? Genau diese Fragestellung – und die nachfolgenden Diskussionspunkte – greifen wir am 23. Oktober im Rahmen eines exklusiven CIDO Roundtables auf.
Read More
Salling Group speeds time to market for capacity amid retail surges
Denmark’s largest retail group, Salling Group, is focused on providing the best shopping experience for its brands’ customers. Migrating to Red Hat® OpenShift® on Google Cloud has brought resilience and scalability, improved operational efficiency, and reduced time-to-market for new nodes and new clusters.
Denmark’s largest retail group, Salling Group, is focused on providing the best shopping
experience for its brands’ customers, whether in its stores or online. While the community
version of the Kubernetes distribution that powers Red Hat OpenShift had provided a solid
platform for around 70 business-critical applications, its lack of stability and elasticity when
running on-premises meant Salling Group could not expand its use. Migrating to Red Hat
OpenShift on Google Cloud has brought resilience and scalability, improved operational
efficiency, and reduced time-to-market for new nodes and new clusters.
Adapting over the decades to evolving shopping habits
With a history that spans more than 110 years, Salling Group, Denmark’s largest retail group,
serves 11 million customers weekly. Its brands have evolved over the decades to support new
shopping habits and lifestyle changes; they include føtex, Bilka, and Netto. The group’s focus today
continues to be on providing the best shopping experience for its brands’ customers, whether in its
stores or online.
Upstream OKD—the community version of the Kubernetes distribution that powers Red Hat
OpenShift—had provided a solid platform for the group’s front- and back-end systems for many
years. While a partner provided the on-premises container platform, which hosted all customizations
and add-ons to Salling Group’s e-commerce platform. The 70 or so business-critical applications
running on the platform also include web shops, the entire purchase workflow for those shops and
telephone purchases, and m-commerce applications.
“Our management liked OKD and wanted to use it more,” said Shrutimitranand Chaturvedi,
Lead Engineer at Salling Group. Future plans included new mobile apps and additional campaigns
and offerings for Black Friday. But a lack of elasticity had impacted web shops’ profits during peak
periods such as Black Friday. “Our on-premise OKD wasn’t very dynamic. We couldn’t scale rapidly
during peak periods. We needed to plan months in advance whenever we needed to scale it up,”
said Chaturvedi.
Moreover, Salling Group had experienced many issues with on-premises OKD: “The platform
had been unavailable for hours at a time on several occasions, causing an unpleasant situation
with our retailers,” said Chaturvedi; a web shop being down could mean lost revenues for a retailer.
“Loads were always heavy on weekends and, because of that, we always had issues when we returned
to work on a Monday morning. We had a name for it—Disaster Monday. OKD running on-premises
was not very stable.”
Adopting an enterprise-level platform in a dynamic cloud
Looking for a more robust and flexible environment, Salling Group decided to adopt an enterpriselevel Kubernetes platform and move to the cloud. With OKD being the community version of Red
Hat OpenShift, the group chose to migrate from OKD 3 to Red Hat OpenShift 4. And after testing
several cloud environments, it selected Google Cloud. “Management didn’t want to move away from
the Kubernetes distribution in OKD and liked the dynamic nature of Google Cloud,” said Chaturvedi.
“They also liked that Red Hat OpenShift bundles many useful tools out of the box, including
auto-scaling and self-healing.”
With Salling Group one of the pioneers for running Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud,
Chaturvedi and his team worked closely with both Google and Red Hat experts to set up the
environment to meet the group’s specific needs. It also engaged professional support from
pre-sales solution architects for extra confidence during the migration. “We need a shared
virtual private cloud (VCP) in Google Cloud so our network and security teams can manage
their responsibilities separately,” said Chaturvedi. “We worked with Red Hat and Google experts
to figure out how to achieve the setup we needed.”
Chaturvedi and his team migrated the first set of applications—four customer support applications—
in just a month. With the customer support applications public-facing, Google Cloud features ensure
the network is secured with appropriate firewall rules put in place.
Enjoying peace of mind with a highly resilient and dynamic platform
Eliminated downtime during critical peak periods
Migrating to Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud has significantly improved resilience for Salling
Group. “Our environment is more stable with Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud,” said Chaturvedi.
He shared the example of a typical Black Friday—one of the year’s biggest events when traffic can
increase up to 20-fold. Thanks to Red Hat OpenShift, the big gathering with 20 people staying up
all night in the office to keep applications running is a thing of the past.
“Previously, we always had issues on Black Friday,” said Chaturvedi. “But since adopting Red Hat
OpenShift, the event has passed almost unnoticed for my team.” He revealed how on the first Black
Friday after migrating to Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud, his team gathered in the office just
like they always had in the past. But with no issues to fix, they got bored, enjoyed a nice meal,
then went home because there were no issues to fix.
Freed up five person-days each quarter
The self-healing and auto-scaling mechanisms in Red Hat OpenShift 4 have also freed up valuable
resources for Salling Group. Previously, Chaturvedi and his team would spend at least five persondays each quarter on regular maintenance of the OKD environment. “There was always something
we needed to do on the machines,” said Chaturvedi. “With Red Hat OpenShift 4 on Google Cloud,
we now have a stable environment that we spend almost zero time maintaining.”
Chaturvedi’s team no longer has to spend valuable time ensuring clusters are up or worrying about
something happening to one of the nodes. He added that “the self-healing in Red Hat OpenShift 4
is really amazing; we really like that it’s available out of the box”. For developers, it means they can
focus on their deliveries rather than getting held up by environmental issues.
Being able to add an extra node at the click of a button when you’re running out of capacity is
equally important to Salling Group. “We just have to click, and we have an extra node,” said
Chaturvedi. “And if we have too many nodes, we can remove one at the click of a button,
knowing everything will continue to work.”
Reduced time-to-market for new nodes and new clusters
With Red Hat OpenShift, a new node can be available in less than ten minutes—a far cry from the
three months’ wait of yesteryear. Previously, Salling Group would need to follow a rigid process
whenever it needed additional capacity. Chaturvedi and his team would need to give three months’
advance notice.
“With Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud, we get the dynamic behavior that allows us to change
capacity quickly whenever we need to,” said Chaturvedi. “Being able to add extra capacity very
quickly when we run short of resources is a very, very big improvement for us.” Provisioning a new
cluster is also much faster; it takes half an hour at most compared to up to eight hours with OKD.
From the developers’ perspective, the new environment has cut the time it takes to deploy
application changes from 45 minutes to less than three. “Migrating to Red Hat OpenShift 4
on Google Cloud has brought us continuous delivery,” said Chaturvedi. “Developers have more
confidence to do frequent deployments and make frequent changes.”
Made access to enterprise-level support easy
Salling Group never felt alone, revealed Chaturvedi—a stark contrast to the Group’s previous
experience when working with OKD. Whenever it needed assistance, Red Hat Support was just a
phone call away. “We are very happy with the active support we have from Red Hat,” said Chaturvedi.
“We simply created a support ticket and from there we were able to talk to someone. They were
always able to guide us.”
Expanding success into the future
Migrating to Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud has already brought Salling Group considerable
cost savings—and Chaturvedi sees more savings on the horizon. “Having a dynamic environment
means we no longer have to pay millions for a fixed number of servers that we need to keep for the
whole year even if we are not using them,” said Chaturvedi. “We’re working on using the full power
of the cloud to reduce costs even further.”
Chaturvedi’s team is thinking of shutting down the whole development environment and reducing the
capacity of the pre-production environment after working hours to cut costs—a capability that was not
possible before.
News of the team’s success has spread across Salling Group. “Now, other teams are interested in
moving their applications to Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud,” said Chaturvedi.
About Salling Group
Salling Group operates more than 1,700 stores and web shops in Denmark, Poland, and Germany,
and Starbucks and Carl’s Jr. franchises in Denmark. Its 61,000 colleagues generated a turnover
of 66,2 billion kroner in 2021.
Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
.png)
Isabelle Droll - CIO for Airline, Corporate, Hotels & Resorts and Sustainability at TUI - Data, Diversity, and Destinations
.png)
Sharon Prior - CIO in transition - How Great Tech Leadership Begins with Business Thinking
-1.jpg)
José Antonio López, Group CIO at TOUS - Jewels, Data & AI: Inside the Digital Transformation of TOUS
.png)
Tom Tanghe - General Manager ITC EMEA at Daikin Europe - Reinventing the CIO Role
.jpg)
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.
.png?width=600&height=600&name=Anna%20Kopp%20(1).png)
