Sessions 🗓️
We are very happy to be able to offer you once again an exciting lineup including many new speakers, both from the local community, consisting of MVPs, Microsoft employees and industry leads, who will speak about specific use cases in the industry as well as the latest developments around services in Azure. Be it real life use cases from Rhaetian Railway, a kickstart with Microsoft Copilot and AI Agents or deep dives on Azure Security - these sessions will provide you with insights around Azure and the opportunity to connect with peers and speakers.
The schedule is still subject to change.
⭐️ Transforming DevOps with Azure: Platform Engineering for the Digital Age #
In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, organizations face unprecedented challenges: rapidly shifting customer demands, intensifying competition, and a growing shortage of skilled professionals. Agility and speed have become critical to survival. This talk will showcase how Platform Engineering, powered by Azure, serves as the foundation for overcoming these challenges. By automating complex workflows and infrastructure provisioning, it delivers the scalability and flexibility needed to adapt swiftly, innovate faster, and address skill gaps effectively.
Through in-depth insights, real-world examples, and a live platform demo, this session will explore how Azure-driven platform strategies can transform development processes, enhance productivity, and enable the rapid delivery of high-quality software. Attendees will discover actionable techniques for overcoming scaling challenges, improving developer experience, and streamlining operations by leveraging DevOps practices within a robust, Azure-integrated platform.
🙂 ROMANO ROTH ⚡️ Global Chief of DevOps @ Zühlke
⭐️ It takes more than a prompt - implemeting GenAI for insurance #
Implementing end to end use case leveraging GenAI under strict Finma and LPD regulation in Switzerland is a bit more complex than simply typing a prompt in ChatGPT.
From data privacy, to proper orchestration including non regression, testing, validation, follow up, use case evolution and integration with external services, our speakers will guide you through their journey.
🙂 GAETAN HERVE ⚡️ Product Manager AI @ Vaudoise Assurance
⭐️ How They Broke into our Cloud – And How the Azure CAF Could Have Saved Me #
A leaked credential in a Git repo. It’s a weekend with no one on call. A crypto miner spins up dozens of VMs—by Monday, the invoice is in the thousands. How could we’ve done better?
In this session, I’ll walk you through my nightmare real-world cloud breach scenario and show how ideas and best practices from Azure’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) could have prevented it. Let’s discuss combining technical controls, governance policies, and organizational readiness to secure the cloud before it’s too late.
🙂 TIMO BÖHM ⚡️ Team Lead Cloud Transformation & Infrastructure @ b.telligent
⭐️ True Tales of Cloud Modernisation: From Legacy to Serverless #
A story of how I helped migrate legacy solutions that were built on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 and Dynamics CRM 2011 to modern Cloud technologies, such as Azure Functions, Azure Application Insights, Azure SQL, and Dynamics 365.
Join me to learn about the interesting set of challenges, trade-offs, and constraints that I faced, the solutions that I designed, and I code that I wrote, on the journey to a truly cloud-native architecture.
🙂 ADRIAN PRITCHARD ⚡️ Lead Developer @ Fujitsu
⭐️ Azure OpenAI Unplugged: Real-World Lessons from My Latest GenAI Project #
Thinking of using Azure OpenAI in production? In this session, I’ll share detailed hard-earned lessons from my latest GenAI project, where I combined Azure OpenAI GPT-4 with data integration workflows. As both a solution architect and hands-on developer, I’ll walk you through what worked, what flopped, and what I wish I knew earlier. We’ll dive into managing costs, securing data, reducing hallucinations, fine-tuning prompts, and keeping token usage in check. Whether you’re exploring AI or scaling it, this session is packed with tips to help you avoid pitfalls and build smarter, more efficient AI solutions.
🙂 DIETER GOBEYN ⚡️ Cloud Solution Architect | Azure MVP
⭐️ Azure Emergency Response Environments - Be Ready When It Matters Most #
In the face of modern threats like ransomware attacks, infrastructure compromise, or operational disruptions, organizations need to act quickly and decisively. In this session, Florian Stöckl presents AzERE (Azure Emergency Response Environments), a proven solution designed to empower crisis teams and IT operations during the most critical hours.
You’ll learn how AzERE enables organizations to:
- Rapidly restore communication and coordination channels
- Access essential data and services in a secure fallback environment
- Detect and eliminate attacker persistence and backdoors
- Maintain control, even when core systems are compromised
Based on real-world experience from multiple emergency scenarios, this session offers practical insights into designing a resilient, automated fallback environment using native Azure technologies. If you’re responsible for business continuity, disaster recovery, or security response, this is a must-attend session.
🙂 FLORIAN STÖCKL ⚡️ Azure Lead @ glueckkanja AG
⭐️ Full Steam Ahead: Engineering a Modern Data Platform at Rhaetian Railway #
Discover how Rhaetian Railway is modernizing its data landscape using Azure Databricks, Terraform Infrastructure-as-Code, and Azure DevOps. We’ll explore how CI/CD pipelines streamline development, testing, and deployment across multiple environments, while a configuration file–driven approach brings flexibility and agility to data pipeline management. Learn about our key design principles, best practices for parameterizing data flows at scale, how we incorporate data quality checks to ensure reliable analytics, and the lessons we’ve learned on our journey toward a fully automated, high-performance data platform.
🙂 SIMON SCHWAB ⚡️ Senior Data & AI Consultant @ Swisscom
⭐️ Enhancing Legal Document Analysis with Reflection Agents, Semantic Kernel, and Azure AI Search #
In this session, we will explore the implementation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) on Swiss law documents using Semantic Kernel and Azure AI Search. We will delve into the step-by-step optimization process that enhanced the solution’s efficiency and accuracy. Finally, show the architecture using Reflection Agents and advanced Azure AI Search capabilities. Attendees will gain insights into the challenges faced, the strategies employed to overcome them, and the significant improvements achieved in legal document analysis. This session is ideal for developers, data scientists, and legal tech enthusiasts looking to leverage advanced AI techniques for document processing and analysis. Join us to discover how cutting-edge technology can transform the way we interact with complex legal texts.
🙂 CÉDRIC MENDELIN ⚡️ Senior Software Developer @ isolutions
⭐️ Stay safe! – Mastering Network Security on Azure #
Besides the right cloud strategy, a lot of infrastructure decisions must be made by an organization to lead the cloud journey to success. Before start moving workloads or modernizing applications on Azure, enterprises are faced with difficult and complex architectural decisions, like how to protect cloud applications from network-based cyberattacks using the right Azure Network Security services to meet the compliance rules. In this session Stefan will focus on Azure Security topics from the network perspective and describe how Azure Network services, capabilities and mechanisms can be used to build highly secured cloud environments on Azure, focused on the following main areas:
- Architectural network security disciplines
- Conceptual network design & approaches
- Azure Virtual Network as foundation layer
- Network segmentation/isolation (zone models)
- Traffic management and control on cloud networks
- Security for external interfaces and endpoints
The audience will get the knowledge of how to create a secure platform and use Azure services the right way to build secure applications as well as to avoid potential vulnerabilities in the Azure “Landing Zone”. Based on the strict security and compliance requirements of organizations, Stefan will share all relevant recommendations, best practices, practical experience, and potential pitfalls to provision and mange cloud workload in Azure the secure and smart way.
🙂 STEFAN RAPP ⚡️ Cloud Solution Architect @ Xebia | Microsoft Azure Infrastructure as Code MVP
⭐️ Level up your Cost Observability with the new FinOps standard FOCUS and Microsoft Fabric #
In this session, attendees will learn how to leverage the new FinOps billing standard FOCUS and Microsoft Fabric to gain better visibility over their Cloud Costs.
We will compare this stack against the native Azure Cost Management tools and see why it may sometimes be a better fit (FinOps personas, Subscriptions types, etc.).
🙂 ALEXANDRE PARÈS ⚡️ Sr. Cloud FinOps Engineer @ FinOps Foundation | FinOps Certified Professional
⭐️ Building a Cloud Centric Network with Azure Virtual WAN #
Within this session I will run through the core concepts and components of Azure Virtual WAN, and explore how it can create a powerful Cloud-centric network within Azure and beyond.
As well as a technical exploration, this session will explore the benefits that Azure Virtual WAN brings to Azure Environments, including network control, expansion, and security.
As well as covering the above I will dive into the various deployment methods and options, and showcase how Azure Virtual WAN enables flexibility and rapid network expansion with ease. Security will also be a core focus, and I will discuss and showcase how services like Azure Firewall can be integrated into Azure Virtual WAN.
I’ll also run through a demonstration of Azure Virtual WAN, and explore various deployment options, including Infrastructure as Code and more. There will also be time for questions and discussion.
🙂 JAKE WALSH ⚡️ Senior Solution Architect @ CDW UK | Microsoft Azure MVP & Hashicorp Ambassador
⭐️ Platform Engineering with Terraform, Crossplane and Port #
In this Session, Arindam will walk you through creating an internal developer portal with Terraform, Crossplane and Port
- Platform Engineering Concepts,
- Platform Engineering with Terraform and Azure Devops,
- Platform Engineering with Crossplane,
- Port - Internal developer portal.
🙂 ARINDAM MITRA ⚡️ Cloud Services Lead @ Axpo Group
⭐️ From Copilot to Autopilot – How AI Coding Tools Are Transforming the Developer Role #
AI-powered coding tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, bolt.new, and v0 are rapidly changing software development. They write code, suggest optimizations, and automate entire workflows – but what does this mean for us as developers?
Is the role of software developers at risk, or does AI open up new opportunities? This keynote explores how AI coding tools are reshaping our daily work, which skills will be essential in the future, and how you can future-proof your career. Discover how to leverage AI to work more productively, increase your value, and actively shape your professional path.
🙂 DANIEL SOGL ⚡️ Software Architect @ Thinktecture
⭐️ DNS in hybrid cloud environments - can it be that hard? #
In short, no, DNS is not simple. It has been around for decades and is an essential component of a hybrid cloud environment. Despite this, many environments still struggle when it comes to designing rock-solid, hybrid DNS solutions, and trust me, it comes with a lot of pitfalls! After attending this session you know what you need to know - and how to avoid name resolution disasters.
🙂 MARCEL ZEHNER ⚡️ Microsoft Cloud Champion @ SoftwareONE | Microsoft Azure MVP & Microsoft Regional Director
⭐️ The AI Evolution: How Emerging AI Trends are Transforming the Cloud Services #
The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI), from Generative AI to autonomous AI Agents, is fundamentally reshaping cloud computing paradigms. This session explores how the latest developments in AI—particularly the emergence of intelligent, autonomous AI agents—are driving transformative changes in cloud architectures, deployment models, and service delivery. With a specific focus on Azure cloud environments, we examine how developers and technology leaders can leverage new AI capabilities to unlock significant business opportunities, enhance operational efficiency, and accelerate innovation. We will discuss key technological breakthroughs, practical implications, strategic opportunities, and critical challenges, offering actionable insights and forward-looking guidance tailored specifically for cloud developers and architects.
🙂 MARC STAMPFLI ⚡️ Business Director Switzerland @ NVIDIA