The Summit organized on March 30 at Deloitte's DSquare by TechSense by The Dots, the all-channel platform fully dedicated to the Tech, Innovation and Digital community, brought together 150 CIOs and tech decision makers eager to exchange views, ideas and practices on the latest developments in cloud computing.

The Cloud indeed became one of the biggest technological winners in the last two years. With the sanitary crisis, it proved to be both an easily accessible all-purpose platform that enables rapid deployments and a well-established standard that gives flexibility and cost savings. And with a continued importance of cloud services in almost all business operations, there is no doubt that the cloud is the future.

Ronan Vander Elst, Partner at Deloitte Luxembourg, opened the conference by presenting the firm's vision of the cloud computing market. He indicated that the innovation trends to keep an eye on are "industry cloud", "cloud marketplaces", and "cloud building blocks" that can provide best-of-breed components to organizations. 

He gave the floor to Jean-Pierre Le Goaller, Head of Technology at AWS Benelux, for a "Cloud Inspiration" session during which he listed topical "cloud transformation blockers" and present ways to resolve them.

Cloud Transformation Client Stories

Kamel Amroune, CIO of The Dots, took the stage to introduce the following speakers, CIOs from the healthcare, financial, and insurance sectors who came - with their technological partners - to tell the audience how they experienced the cloud transformation projects set up by and for their respective businesses.    

Philipp Jäggi, CIO of Laboratoires Réunis, explained to the participants how the "Cloud (can) enable the fast building of software products and services in the healthcare sector". Laurent Pulinckx, CIO of Bourse de Luxembourg, was accompanied by Candi Carrera, Country Manager of Microsoft Luxembourg. He addressed the question of "cloud-enabled rapid development in the financial sector", taking as an example the case of his own organization's cloud transformation program. Candi Carrera reminded the participants that "moving to the Cloud requires knowledge and preparation". He advised them to "continue gathering feedback, adapt and learn from customers, partners and regulators". 

Vincent Arnal, CIO of LALUX, described the "cloud-ready infrastructure approach" taken by his organization and the transformational steps involved. His co-speakers, Julien Varela, Cloud Architect at Nutanix, and Dario Wiser, Director EMEA of Oracle, asserted that "enterprise IT need(ed) both private and public clouds" in the form of "unified hybrid clouds" (Julien Varela) and that "the ideal cloud (would be one) meeting customers where they are through public clouds, on-premises clouds, and on-premises traditional IT" (Dario Wiser). AXA Luxembourg's CIO, Olivier Vansteelandt, gave an enlightening speech entitled "Innovating New Normal" in which he described AXA's "move to the Cloud" strategy, "a customer-driven, tech-led transformation in a regulated environment". Gianni Cooreman, Director Industry Solution Advisors & Deputy Country Leader of Salesforce BeLux, urged organizations to reflect on how they "engage customers, enable collaboration, embrace technology, make decisions, and serve society".

Workshops session

In parallel with those presentations, experts from technology companies held several workshops intended to respond to specific issues. In that respect, Audric Lhoas, Cloud Product Manager at Telindus, explained "how multi-cloud (was) impacting IT landscapes and why IT governance (had) never been more difficult". Vassilios Kakarakis, Cloud Strategist at Kyndryl, gave a workshop on "how to deliver prescriptive operations in complex ecosystems with AIOps". AIOps - a term first coined by Gartner - is the application of advanced analytics, in the form of machine learning and artificial intelligence, towards automating operations. For its part, Luc Halbardier, Head of Presales and Business Development at POST Telecom, gave a presentation on the importance of  connectivity and security in a cloud strategy.

After a wrap-up round table moderated by Sébastien Genco, Director Technology and Enterprise Applications at Deloitte Luxembourg, the afternoon ended with a friendly networking cocktail.

Michaël Renotte