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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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Supporting PUMA's move to cloud voice with Microsoft Teams with BT

Learn about how BT have been supporting PUMA’s push towards a harmonised global voice and collaboration platform with a cloud-based solution from Microsoft Teams.

Overview
Sports company PUMA is known worldwide for relentlessly pushing sport and culture forward by creating fast products for the world’s fastest athletes. The German company is present in more than 120 countries.

When it comes to communications and collaboration, PUMA have taken decisive action to deliver the tools and experiences their people need to keep the business at the front of the market.

We’ve been partnering with PUMA since 2005, so when they wanted to take their cloud communications and collaboration tools up a gear, we were ready with rapid, effective solutions and support.

The challenge
PUMA were using Microsoft Teams as their core collaboration platform, so it made sense to integrate their voice services into the application too. Their drive was to give employees a seamless working experience, focused on a single application. While Microsoft Teams was already used internally, alongside other applications, PUMA also wanted to make it the one-touch solution for communication with external partners and get rid of traditional telephones. From this base, employees would be free to dial out whenever they needed to, and everyone would be reachable via the voice network – removing any barriers to the collaboration and innovation that have made PUMA a success.

Eager to unlock these benefits quickly, PUMA chose to make a rapid, ‘big bang’ change away from a mixture of legacy and cloud Private Branch Exchange (PBX) infrastructure to one, harmonised platform. PUMA wanted a partner that could provide managed voice functionality into Microsoft Teams on a global scale. This needed to include a global SIP service, all number porting and the ability to deliver voice directly into the Microsoft Azure cloud. In addition, the service also needed to connect some analogue devices and fax machines.

As a leading global sports brand, we need to be fast and flexible. As such, it was our ambition to have a leading global solution for communication and collaboration – and BT’s integrated solution does exactly that. Combining Microsoft Teams with BT’s global voice services has given us a seamless working experience within a single application.”

Zoran Balenovic

Teamhead IT Communication Systems, PUMA SE

The solution
We created an integrated solution for PUMA that brought together the power of Microsoft Teams with our global voice services. We combined this with full project management support from our professional services team to ensure a smooth and efficient deployment process.

PUMA’s PBX hardware and local phone lines are now a thing of the past. Our resilient global SIP trunks (secured by Transport Layer Security (TLS) / Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (sRTP) encryption) now connect PUMA to the Microsoft Azure cloud in each region to ensure superior quality of service. Our teams took care of all national compliance regulations involved in porting PUMA phone numbers and provided new numbers when required.

We included PowerSuite to protect PUMA employees’ ability to use Microsoft Teams to call and collaborate wherever they are without disruption. This end-to-end monitoring and reporting tool gives at-a-glance insight into user quality experience. Working across all internet service parts and third-party internet providers, it brings clarity and allows rapid issue resolution. And PUMA can call on our worldwide customer service centres for component support around the clock.

We introduced local managed gateways to take care of analogue device connections and we forward all fax calls directly from our global voice platform to PUMA’s cloud fax service.

The result
In partnership with PUMA, we established a global standard for Microsoft Teams-integrated voice services. The initial stage of roll out saw around 2,000 PUMA users across Germany, France, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands moving onto our Microsoft Teams voice functionality, with the agile implementation process only taking a few weeks.

Today, PUMA has the flexibility to scale their voice services up and down in line with business needs, including coverage in South Africa as well as APAC and EMEA regions. With rapid configuration, short timescales and all the complex regulations that vary from region to region taken care of, PUMA has a secure, encrypted cloud-based voice service that’s ready to grow with them.

Two years into the project, our voice services have delivered the reliability and stability that PUMA needs to thrive; PUMA hasn’t needed to raise a single incident ticket after completing the migration.

It's been fantastic to partner with such a forward-thinking and fast-moving company to streamline their infrastructure and deliver high-quality voice services via Microsoft Teams. A highlight has been hitting every goal – and supporting PUMA’s sustainability journey with a cloud-based, ‘only buy what you need’ service that can reduce power consumption.”

Dorit Bode

Country Manager and Regional Sales Lead, Germany, BT

Technologies

Microsoft Teams SEO PowerSuite

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