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Belgium 13-11-2026 Squad Only Physical English

Building the Business Case for New IT Capabilities; How to justify investment when value is strategic, shared, or only visible over time.

Many IT capabilities are essential and difficult to fund through a simple project ROI. The challenge is showing why architecture, governance, resilience, cybersecurity maturity, data foundations, and AI readiness deserve investment before the gap becomes expensive. Three pressure points make the case harder. - Shared value means the benefit often sits across several teams, while the budget sits in one place. - Timing creates friction because the cost is immediate while the value appears over time. - Risk translation is needed so business and finance leaders understand the consequence of delaying the investment. The working question is simple: how do we turn foundational IT capabilities into credible investment cases that link cost, risk, business value, and future flexibility? If you are building these cases internally, let’s compare how others are positioning value, risk, and timing.

Belgium 19-11-2026 All Members Physical English

Europe’s Digital Foundations

Public organisations are re-evaluating the digital foundations on which critical services depend. Cloud strategy is increasingly shaped by questions of operational control, legal exposure, supplier dependency, interoperability and long-term resilience. For public-sector leaders, the issue is not only where workloads are hosted, but how much strategic control remains over the technologies that support essential public services. This is where European cloud initiatives, sovereign infrastructure and open-source technologies become strategically important. Together, they can increase transparency, preserve portability and reduce dependency on individual providers. But they also raise practical questions around maturity, procurement, integration, support models and long-term sustainability. Open source brings a specific dimension to this discussion. It claims to better support transparency, interoperability and strategic autonomy, but it is also requiring clear governance, security controls and operational support. The opportunity is to understand where open technologies can strengthen the public-sector technology stack, where commercial platforms remain essential and how both can coexist within a coherent European digital strategy. Three questions shape the discussion: Which parts of the public-sector technology stack require stronger European control? What role should open-source technologies play in reducing dependency and strengthening transparency? Which governance and procurement decisions will determine whether a sovereign cloud strategy succeeds? Bringing these perspectives together can define where sovereign cloud and open technologies create strategic value, identify the decisions that deserve executive attention, and establish practical principles for strengthening Europe’s digital foundations while preserving flexibility and innovation. See you at the table?

Belgium 24-11-2026 Country Members Physical French

Les Rencontres: Innovation de l'Ombre

Créativité vs. Chaos : Quelle est la gouvernance minimale ? Le défi principal est d'équilibrer le risque et le rythme du changement. Les équipes métier adoptent de nouveaux outils d'IA et low-code de leur propre chef, créant une véritable créativité mais aussi un risque massif et non géré. Cette discussion se concentre sur l'établissement de voies simples et sûres pour l'innovation, en débattant de la gouvernance minimale qui protège la réputation de l'entreprise tout en évitant l'erreur d'écraser les initiatives utiles dans l'ombre. Questions clés d'Échange entre pairs : Où l'innovation de l'ombre aide-t-elle plutôt que de nuire, et comment éviter de l'écraser ? Quelle est la gouvernance minimale qui protège la réputation tout en maintenant la vitesse, et à qui appartient-elle réellement ? Comment les pairs ont-ils réussi à transformer les efforts initiaux de l'ombre en services officiels soutenus sans perdre la confiance de l'entreprise ? Comment pouvons-nous rendre plus facile d'innover de manière responsable que de simplement agir en franc-tireur ?

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CA-GIP scales with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Crédit Agricole Group Infrastructure Platform (CA-GIP) provides IT infrastructure services and production support for the group’s insurance, corporate banking, and investment banking businesses. To scale automation across tens of thousands of servers, CA-GIP replaced its community automation solution with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Benefits:

Achieved return on investment (ROI) in just one year
Automated operations for 20,000 Linux servers in the equivalent of one employee’s work hours
Simplified adoption of new automation capabilities
Improved infrastructure security with a central automation approach

Founded in 1894, Crédit Agricole Group is the largest cooperative financial institution and tenth largest bank in the world. The bank established the Infrastructure Platform team (CA-GIP) in 2019 to manage its IT infrastructure and technology and services operations for its insurance, corporate banking, and investment banking services.

As demand for digital financial services rapidly increased, CA-GIP sought to improve the group’s operational efficiency to keep pace. The group decided to replace its community Ansible solution with cost-effective technology that could integrate a variety of systems for current and future business needs. Additionally, CA-GIP sought to support reuse of established scripts as commands or application programming interfaces (APIs) to save time on repetitive automation management tasks and reduce risk of human error.

Adopting stable, supported enterprise automation technology from Red Hat

Based on its successful past adoption of Red Hat platform technology, CA-GIP decided to adopt Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to manage infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and patching.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an agentless solution for managing complex deployments and repetitive tasks across enterprise environments of any scale. Ansible's simple YAML language, in the form of Ansible Playbooks, lets teams across an organization share, vet, and manage automation content. In the first phase of CA-GIP’s deployment, Ansible Automation Platform was used to automate processes across more than 20,000 Linux servers.

Although it had already applied automation to support a variety of business needs, CA-GIP engaged Red Hat Consulting to work with the group’s senior engineering staff and help its teams quickly build related skills.

Investing in operational efficiency across teams

Achieved return on investment (ROI) in just one year
Significantly reduced automation effort and resources, achieving automated operations for 20,000 Linux servers in the equivalent of one employee’s work hours
Simplified adoption of new automation capabilities with Red Hat OpenShift operators, modular software for packaging, deploying, and managing Kubernetes-native applications
Improved infrastructure security with supported enterprise technology and a central automation approach across DevOps teams
Improved talent management with less need for proprietary specialists

Planning an improved IT experience with automation-centric DevOps

After its initial success with its enhanced, automation-centric DevOps approach, CA-GIP plans to expand its Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to a total of 45,000 Linux and Microsoft Windows servers.

“Red Hat offered us a path to our future goal of providing a seamless experience to all of CA-GIP’s DevOps teams through a single technical solution,” said Liozon.

Technologies

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

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