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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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novobanco delivers personalized digital experiences to customers

Portugal's novobanco sought to reinvent banking with personalized, digital customer experiences. The bank decided to migrate to a container- and microservices-based application infrastructure. Microsoft Azure Red Hat® OpenShift®, a jointly managed solution, helped the bank adopt a hybrid environment for new and existing applications.

Portugal’s novobanco sought to reinvent banking with personalized, digital customer
experiences based on open banking practices. To support this strategy, the bank decided to
migrate to a container- and microservices-based application infrastructure. Microsoft Azure
Red Hat OpenShift, a jointly managed solution, helped the bank adopt a hybrid environment for
new and existing applications. Now, using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/
CD) and DevOps approaches, novobanco has increased its digital services adoption, reduced
time to market for applications, and improved partner integration using open banking
application programming interfaces (APIs).

Rethinking physical and digital banking experiences
novobanco operates a vast network of branches and business centers across Portugal,
complemented by its novobanco Linha Direta telephone banking service and digital banking
offering, novobanco Online.
Shortly after American equity firm Lone Star Funds acquired 75% of its capital in 2017, the bank
engaged management consulting firm McKinsey & Company to help define a three-year IT strategy.
“We needed to change the way we developed our offerings to speed time to market,” said Manuel
Domingues, CIO, novobanco. “Achieving that goal meant addressing four key areas of our business
to increase efficiency: our technology, our processes, our organization, and our culture.”
Working with McKinsey, the bank planned a new approach to digital business based on cloud
computing and big data, supported by a microservices-based architecture and DevOps practices.
This new approach would not only help reduce operating costs but also support entry into new digital
markets with open banking application programming interfaces (APIs).
“By changing how we acquire and engage with our customers, across physical and digital channels,
we could meet our larger goal of expanding our customer base,” said Domingues.

Building a managed, secured environment for application development
After searching for a cloud platform, novobanco chose Red Hat OpenShift for its local enterprise
support and multicloud capabilities.
“Red Hat OpenShift was the ideal choice to be able to deliver customer services flawlessly while
switching between hosting containers on-premise and in the cloud,” said Domingues.
The bank worked with Red Hat Consulting to test several use cases, including running a microservice
in Red Hat OpenShift using the Spring Boot Java™ framework, a DevOps pipeline for automating
development processes, and a proof of concept (POC) demonstrating digital channel interactions.
Next, the bank deployed Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift in production and began migrating
its applications—as microservices—to this on-premise environment, jointly managed by Red Hat
and Microsoft. Red Hat’s single sign-on (SSO) technology helps secure novobanco’s microservices,
integrating with the bank’s existing Azure Active Directory servers to validate user credentials and
extract identity information.
The bank now uses its container environment—as well as React.js, an open source JavaScript user
interface library—to design and deploy low-code front-end applications, such as its smartphone app.

Focusing on innovation for customers and partners

Reduced time to market for digital services
With a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) approach supported by DevOps
processes and automation, novobanco can deliver new, personalized services to its customers
faster. For example, the bank recently developed new push notifications for transaction validation
that improve security and reduce messaging costs for customers. Additionally, using Red Hat and
Microsoft’s cost-effective, jointly managed service also helps novobanco stay productive by
mitigating time-consuming infrastructure maintenance tasks

The bank is already seeing positive outcomes from spending less time on routine delivery processes
and more time on innovation, including 20% year over year (YOY) growth in mobile interactions and
a 7% YOY increase in the number of active digital customers. As the result of a 165% YOY increase
across most of its portfolio, digital now makes up more than 1/3 of the bank’s total product sales.
As part of this approach, the bank is developing frameworks for various needs—such as simulations or
integration—with defined patterns that can be reused by more than one development team

Improved responsiveness with scalable, supported hybrid infrastructure
With plans to design all new applications to be cloud-native, novobanco can use its vendor-agnostic
Red Hat OpenShift container environment to prevent lock-in to specific cloud providers. The flexibility to move workloads between clouds will help the bank cost-effectively scale to meet demand.
Additionally, developers no longer need to build applications to run in specific environments, improving productivity and supporting DevOps collaboration.
“With Red Hat OpenShift, we can move workloads between on-premise and off-premise environments without needing to change any code,” said Domingues. “Some applications will remain on
premise for now, such as those with specific regulatory requirements, any that might be affected by
latency, or any that have not yet been optimized for microservices or the cloud. When we’re ready, we
have the flexibility to move them to Azure Red Hat OpenShift without any service interruptions or
outages.”

Improved support for integration with third-party partners
Supporting its open banking API approach with a scalable, secure integration process will help novobanco enter new digital banking markets by partnering with other financial services organizations.
“Running containers and microservices on Red Hat OpenShift allows us to support open banking APIs
as well as integrations with SaaS or PaaS technology solutions from partners,” said Domingues.

Enhanced technology adoption with expert support and guidance
Engaging Red Hat Consulting and participating in Red Hat Training on Red Hat OpenShift helped the
bank’s teams quickly gain the necessary skills to support its digital strategy. In addition to support
during the POC stage, Red Hat consultants helped stabilize the bank’s OpenShift cluster in production, set up a cluster for testing configuration changes, and manage platform implementation and
upgrades. For example, the bank continues to work with Red Hat for infrastructure, development,
and application architecture optimization.
“Red Hat Consulting helped us take advantage of best practices so that we could focus on developing solutions and integrations that meet our business needs and delivering new features to market
faster,” said Domingues.

Enhancing hybrid approach to continue digital services journey
novobanco plans to continue using Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for both legacy and new
applications, with a goal to shift up to half of its modernized applications to run in a multicloud environment. The bank is also looking to adopt Red Hat Runtimes, a set of lightweight runtimes and
frameworks that are ideal for highly distributed microservices architectures.
“Hybrid infrastructure and DevOps are changing the way we develop our services and applications,
and Red Hat OpenShift is an essential part of our journey to digital delivery,” said Domingues. “As we
evolve, we expect to achieve further scalability and reliability, among other benefits.”

About novobanco
novobanco is a reference in the Portuguese financial system, recognized by its high standards
of service quality and commercial dynamics with which its clients, individuals, companies, and
institutions are served. It addresses a broad range of clients’ financial needs, acting in a transversal
way in all areas of financial services, such as retail and corporate banking, asset management, and
insurance. https://www.novobanco.pt/

Technologies

Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift®

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