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Belgium 10-09-2026 Squad Only Physical english

Building the Infrastructure AI Needs: From computer and data access to scalability, cost control, and operational readiness.

AI is moving from pilots into operational use, and the infrastructure question is becoming more concrete. The challenge is deciding what needs to be built, expanded, controlled, or delayed as usage grows. Three pressure points usually appear first. - Compute capacity requires careful planning: teams need enough GPU, cloud, or specialised processing power, while keeping utilisation and cost under control. - Data movement becomes more demanding: AI needs access to data across systems, with latency, security, integration, and quality managed from the start. - Operational control becomes essential: monitoring, access rights, resilience, cost visibility, and ownership need to scale with usage. The working question is simple: how do we support AI at scale while keeping infrastructure efficient, governed, and financially sustainable? If you are working through these choices, let’s compare approaches with others facing similar constraints.

Belgium 15-09-2026 Squad Only Virtual english

Turning AI Pilots into Daily Workflows: How to move from experimentation to adoption by redesigning work, ownership, controls, and habits.

AI pilots are easier to launch than to embed into daily operations. The challenge is changing how work happens once AI becomes part of decisions, tasks, handovers, and controls. Three pressure points tend to decide whether adoption holds. - Workflow fit matters: AI has to enter the flow of work as part of the process. - Ownership needs to be clear: someone must own the process, the controls, the exceptions, and the outcome. - User trust has to be built: people need to know when to rely on AI, when to challenge it, and when to escalate. The working question is simple: how do we move AI from promising pilots into daily work while keeping clarity, accountability, and risk control? If this is part of your current reality, let’s compare choices, constraints, and lessons learned.

Belgium 17-09-2026 Country Members Physical french

Les Rencontres: CTO: Le Saint Graal?

Pendant longtemps, le TCO donnait une impression de contrôle. On investissait, on amortissait, on optimisait. Les coûts étaient visibles, relativement prévisibles, et structurés autour d’une logique claire entre CAPEX et OPEX. Ce modèle ne suffit plus à expliquer où va réellement l’argent. Aujourd’hui, une part croissante des dépenses IT ne repose plus sur ce que l’on possède, mais sur ce que l’on consomme: des tokens générés par l’IA des agents qui exécutent des actions en continu des outils SaaS qui se multiplient dans les équipes du cloud qui s’adapte en permanence à l’usage Le coût ne disparaît pas, mais il devient plus diffus, plus dynamique, et souvent plus difficile à attribuer, à expliquer, et à maîtriser. C’est là que des approches comme le Technology Business Management, ou TBM, redeviennent particulièrement utiles: non pas comme un exercice de reporting supplémentaire, mais comme un moyen de relier concrètement les dépenses aux services, aux usages, et aux décisions. Et c’est là aussi que la question du “Saint Graal” revient, mais sous une autre forme. Vous vous demandez peut-être: Comment garder de la maîtrise quand la dépense dépend du comportement, des usages, et parfois même de systèmes autonomes ? Comment piloter l’équilibre CAPEX/OPEX quand le cloud, le SaaS et l’IA déplacent progressivement les coûts vers des modèles variables ? Quels coûts restent encore trop souvent hors radar: ressources métier, formation, support, intégration, sécurité, gouvernance ? Et surtout, qu’est-ce qu’un “bon TCO” veut encore dire quand il faut le mettre en regard d’objectifs parfois plus stratégiques, plus longs à mesurer, ou plus difficiles à quantifier: qualité de service, résilience, agilité, expérience utilisateur, capacité d’innovation ? Ce sont précisément ces questions qui seront au cœur de notre rencontre: une discussion ouverte entre pairs, ancrée dans la réalité du terrain, pas pour débattre de modèles idéaux, mais pour comprendre comment chacun tente, concrètement, de mesurer, d’attribuer et de reprendre le contrôle, sans réduire la valeur d’un choix technologique à son seul coût.

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How our managed SaaS acceleration service shows the way to improved performance

Riverbed SaaS accelerator enables more efficient collaboration and a mobilised workforce.

Overview
Cloud first and O365?
Moving to O365 was critical for this customer - the savings on license fees and management of local servers onsite alone provided the business case for change. But once the migration was completed, the project’s success was impacted by slower response and load times of their O365 applications. This was especially true when larger files were accessed through the corporate WAN at busy times. It took the shine off what had been an amazing migration project, one that started the whole cloud transformation conversation for the customer.

With users asking why responses had gotten worse, action needed to be taken.

The challenge
Improving response and showing results
With delayed O365 performance came frustrated calls from users and it was clear that the IT team needed a resolution. When they turned to us for help, we suggested technology from Riverbed – a tried and trusted BT partner. The customer had already considered a range of vendors that claimed to offer accelerated SaaS services, but agreed Riverbed was the right technology and that we should enable, manage and deploy the solution. This offered the customer reduced risk and improved cashflow because we offer a flexible lease model with fixed monthly rentals – an ideal option to keep cash within the business.

With their use of SaaS Accelerator from BT, the customer has been able to expand the value of SaaS applications like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce to the business.”

Peter DieckSenior product manager Connect Intelligence, BT

The solution
Riverbed SaaS Acceleration services
We set about designing a service for branch offices that would accelerate performance and give users a better experience, using historic network metrics to show the benchmark for performance gains and the resulting business case. The first phase of the solution involved accelerating office-to-cloud performance by deploying Riverbed SteelHead devices into their headquarters and each of their branches, and configuring these using the pre-provisioned virtual clients hosted in O365. The service immediately showed performance improvements of over 49% on weekly data transfers of 2.1 Tebibytes (1 Tebibyte equals 1K Gigabytes).

This virtually slashed the waiting time in half. The next phase is to roll out the solution to their homeworkers by downloading SaaS software clients onto homeworker PCs, so that the same performance improvements can be achieved remotely.

The result
A single source of truth, rapidly accessible from anywhere
A 15MB Excel file or 30MB PowerPoint file that previously took minutes to open now opens in half that time. Company-wide - across 2,600 workers - the time savings are approx. 260 hours weekly and represent a strong return on investment – equivalent gains in productivity to having extra employees.

More efficient collaboration and a mobilised workforce

Now that employees can quickly open and save files on the file server, they’re less tempted to download files to their laptops which means there’s more consistency across the organisation with people not working from local versions of stored information.

Importantly, in the future, the company plans to include the software SaaS clients for workers at home, which will offer the same productivity benefits and O365 experience at home or remotely. It’s an inclusive strategy that gives flexibility and performance to workers wherever they connect from.

It also supports a flexible worker strategy that’s key to improving workforce satisfaction across the business.

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