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Belgium 19-5-26 Invitation Only Physical english

AI vs AI in Cybersecurity: When defenders and attackers both use AI

The game has changed, clearly. Attackers have AI, defenders have AI, and both sides are learning faster than anyone expected, or maybe the attackers are just a bit faster. What used to take hours now happens in seconds, and detection windows close before alerts even appear. It’s adaptation beyond automation, and no one gets to sit still. But every promise of AI-driven defence comes with a price. The tools are expensive to train, maintain, and monitor. Mistakes cost more too. False positives drain teams, model drift hides real threats, and poisoned data turns protection into confusion. So now it’s not only about defending networks, it’s about defending the defenders themselves, from fatigue, blind trust, and automation gone wrong. So how do you keep visibility when both sides use the same weapons? How do you detect intent when patterns look human but aren’t? How do you justify cost when failure still happens, just faster? Let’s explore what happens when algorithms face each other on both sides of the firewall, and what new defences emerge when speed alone is no longer enough. A closed conversation about a future where cybersecurity becomes an AI vs AI battle, and humans still have to win.

Belgium 21-5-26 All Members Physical english

Replace, Wrap, or Rebuild? : Core modernization in financial services and insurance, without a full rewrite.

For banks, insurers, and other financial services leaders, core modernization is rarely a simple technology decision. The harder question is what to replace, what to wrap, what to rebuild selectively, and what to leave alone. This round table brings together senior peers to discuss how they are making those choices under real constraints: resilience, control, regulatory scrutiny, delivery speed, vendor dependency, and the risk of getting sequencing wrong. The conversation will focus on practical judgment, where modernization creates value, where it adds risk, and how to move forward without triggering another multi-year transformation cycle. A small-group discussion for leaders looking for clear decisions, credible trade-offs, and peer perspective.

Belgium 22-5-26 Invitation Only Physical english

Managing Vendor Lock-In: Balancing dependence, cost, and control in strategic partnerships

Every vendor swears their platform is open, flexible, and built for freedom. Then comes the renewal date. The price goes up, migration looks painful, and “strategic partnership” starts to feel more like dependency. Most organisations don’t get trapped overnight, they walk into it one contract at a time. Broadcom, anyone? We know lock-in isn’t only technical, it’s commercial, architectural, and even cultural. Once tools shape how teams work, switching becomes not only costly but politically impossible. So how do you manage dependency without losing leverage? What do you do when moving away costs more than staying? How do you negotiate from a position of weakness? And what governance models help prevent lock-in before it happens? Let’s share how to keep options open, make vendors compete without breaking partnerships, and find leverage even when it seems there’s none left. A closed conversation for those who’ve learned that freedom in IT is rarely free.

May 19, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

AI vs AI in Cybersecurity: When defenders and attackers both use AI

May 22, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Managing Vendor Lock-In: Balancing dependence, cost, and control in strategic partnerships

May 26, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

The Career Path of the Cloud Engineer: From system builder to strategic enabler of digital scale

The cloud engineer’s world keeps expanding. It started with provisioning and automation, but now it touches everything: resilience, security, cost, and even business continuity. What used to be a back-end function has become one of the most visible roles in digital operations. Yet with that visibility comes pressure: constant evolution, constant firefighting, and very little time to step back and ask, “Where is this career actually going?”

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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

Partners

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