Cloud Infrastructure Melbourne 2026 schedule

In this 10-minute networking session, the goal is to connect with three new people. Enjoy the opportunity to expand your network!  

Learn how the most successful technology leaders are redefining their role, influence, and value proposition as AI becomes central to competitive strategy.

• From technology steward to business strategist: Transition from managing IT services to architecting competitive advantage through strategic AI infrastructure
• New leadership competencies: Develop skills in AI business cases, stakeholder alignment, and risk assessment beyond technical expertise
• Organisational influence and governance: Establish new reporting relationships, decision authority, and board-level communication positioning technology leaders as core business strategists

Gain insight into holistic approaches to transform IT infrastructure to enable strategic agility and sustainable business growth.

• Engineering a balanced portfolio: Developing a diversified and future-proof IT portfolio by strategically integrating on-premise, public, and private cloud assets
• Operationalising intelligence with AIOps: Leveraging AI and machine learning to automate infrastructure management, predict system failures, and continuously optimise performance across the enterprise
• Extending infrastructure to the edge: Implementing robust edge infrastructure strategies to support low-latency applications, real-time data processing, and enhanced customer experiences

Architect foundations that support both current operations and future innovations without requiring wholesale replacement.

• AI-native architecture design: Accommodate AI workload demands through specialised hardware, distributed processing, and elastic scaling
• Emerging technology talent strategies: Evolve organisational capabilities blending traditional expertise with AI operations and cloud-native architectures
• Adaptive governance for innovation: Balance innovation enablement with operational stability, enabling rapid technology evaluation and integration

Moderator

Bernadeth Lucanas Cloud, Data, AI, & Cyber Security Expert

Panellists

Chandima Miyanadeniya Global Head of Enterprise Architecture Kennedys

Manohar Esarapu Chief Information & Innovation Officer City of Port Philip

Discover practical, data-driven approaches to optimise infrastructure, reduce costs, and strengthen business resilience.

• Balancing strategic investments: Allocating capital across a mix of on-premise, public, and private cloud environments by analysing total cost of ownership
• Architecting for resilience: Designing hybrid infrastructures that balance cloud agility with the control and performance of dedicated infrastructure
• Driving a value-based FinOps culture: Operationalising financial discipline and continuous optimisation through advanced automation and governance across the IT portfolio

Define, implement, and scale an AI strategy that is integrated with your core mission, creating a foundation for sustained competitive advantage.

• Translating AI potential to tangible outcomes: Define a value-driven roadmap that aligns AI investments with strategic goals
• Building the AI-ready organisation: Create foundational infrastructure and capabilities to support organisation-wide AI adoption
• Governance and the human element of AI: Implement governance frameworks, change management, and talent models to navigate AI's complexity 

A strategic debate on where long-term business value truly lies, exploring:

• Whether a complex cloud landscape is necessary for innovation, or if it creates operational friction and jeopardises control.
• If best-of-breed approaches drive superior resilience, or whether standardisation offers a more secure and manageable foundation.
• The greater strategic risk: vendor lock-in vs. the hidden cost and overhead of managing a diverse cloud ecosystem.

Moderator

Rucha Gatti Associate Director, Resilience Risk NAB

Panellists

Jason Smith Director, Enabling Technology Victoria University

Natalie Drane GM Technology Operations CareSuper

Dom Pietrzy Cloud & Infrastructure Architecture Lead Victorian Government  

Explore governance frameworks and decision-making strategies that maximise AI business value whilst maintaining operational control and strategic flexibility.

• Strategic AI deployment decisions: Evaluate AI workload placement based on performance requirements, data sovereignty, and business objectives
• Governance and risk management: Establish oversight frameworks ensuring consistent AI performance, security, and compliance across environments
• Value optimisation strategies: Implement measurement practices aligning AI investments with business outcomes and competitive positioning 

• Distinguishing traditional AI agents as task executors versus agentic systems and understanding why this shifts competitive advantage
• How treating AI agents as a digital workforce – with defined roles, accountability, escalation paths, and performance metrics – drives reliability, auditability, and ROI, particularly in regulated financial environments
• Lessons from three years at the front line of adoption - where agentic approaches outperform traditional automation and where human oversight remains essential

Discover how to build infrastructure foundations for competitive advantage through strategic deployment, not technology ideology.

• Strategic deployment flexibility: Evaluate AI workload placement based on data sensitivity, performance, regulations, and costs
• Performance and cost optimisation: Balance predictable on-premise costs with scalable cloud services for different AI cases
• Integration and customisation strategies: Design infrastructure enabling deep integration and specialised development while leveraging cloud innovations

Design intelligent cloud infrastructure to federate ecosystems, accelerate innovation, and enable strategic agility.

• Federating a multi-cloud ecosystem: Create a cohesive environment enabling interoperability and optimised workload placement
• Accelerating innovation: Build reusable platforms that empower safe, scalable developer and business innovation
• Enabling strategic agility: Embed automation and guardrails to balance freedom, risk, and ROI

Dive into architecture modernisation, scalability planning, and integration strategies for large-scale AI workloads.

• Architecture modernisation: Update cloud infrastructure supporting AI workloads with advanced technologies for performance and agility
• Scalability planning: Design cloud systems seamlessly expanding for growing AI demand while maintaining cost efficiency
• Data, AI, and automation integration: Leverage integrated platforms connecting data pipelines, AI workflows, and operations for faster innovation 

In this session, we move beyond theory to unpack the real-world challenges of implementing FinOps in modern, AI-influenced cloud environments, and what it actually takes to turn cost visibility into meaningful accountability and optimisation.

• Beyond the myth: Why FinOps isn’t just a finance function — and why treating it as cost cutting alone creates friction with engineering teams
• Engineering meets economics: How to bring developers, platform, and SRE teams into the FinOps conversation without slowing innovation
• FinOps in the age of AI: Managing the new cost dynamics of AI workloads, including experimentation, burst usage, and unpredictable consumption patterns
• From visibility to action: Turning dashboards into decisions through shared accountability, better architectural choices, and continuous optimisation

Drive business value by embedding FinOps practices for cost transparency, optimised ROI, and control.

• Achieving cost transparency and eliminating sprawl: Leverage FinOps practices for real-time multi-cloud visibility and eliminate underutilised resources
• Optimising ROI across investments: Maximise value by balancing performance, scalability, and efficiency for measurable business outcomes
• Embedding financial governance into operations: Establish guardrails and accountability frameworks enabling secure, responsible scaling without stifling innovation 

Making smarter, data‑driven investment decisions by understanding the true cost, value, and strategic role of each layer in a hybrid infrastructure portfolio.

• Build a financially intelligent hybrid strategy by comparing true total cost of ownership (TCO) across environments, including hidden operational, compliance, and scaling costs.
• Determine the right workload placement by analysing performance, data sensitivity, governance requirements, and long‑term cost predictability.
• Maximise ROI through balanced investment—pairing on‑prem stability with cloud agility to create a scalable, cost‑efficient, future‑ready infrastructure portfolio.

Harness AI's transformative potential while maintaining the reliability and security that business demands.

• Reactive to predictive transformation: Anticipate and prevent issues, shifting from firefighting to strategic value creation
• Collaborative human-AI workforce strategy: Reimagine roles focusing talent on strategic work while AI handles routine tasks
• AI-driven governance and risk management: Build adaptive resilience ensuring automated decisions align with business requirements 

As organisations adopt agentic AI systems that can adapt and evolve independently, traditional cloud transformation and operating models are being challenged. The handover from build to run is no longer straightforward—leaving infrastructure and operations teams managing systems that continuously change behaviour.

This session explores how organisations must rethink change management, ownership, and alignment to successfully embed AI into cloud environments by delving into:

• Why agentic AI breaks traditional assumptions of cloud transformation—and what this means for infrastructure and operations teams
• Redefining ownership and accountability when systems evolve beyond the teams that build them
• Aligning business, IT, and operations to manage continuous change in AI-driven environments
• Embedding governance, communication, and metrics to ensure AI initiatives deliver sustained business value

Speakers

Craig Padayachee Head of IT Operations, Technology Defence Bank

Catherine Zhang FinOps Lead Australian Federal Agency

Vijayan Seenisamy Group Transformation Lead Woolworths Group

Evolve operating models, processes, and talent to accelerate digital business transformation.

• Reinventing talent and processes: Reinvent teams for rapid delivery, continuous improvement, and modern tech talent
• Redefining IT governance: Redefine governance to enable speed, empowerment, and agile experimentation
• Scaling innovation: Create a culture that rewards experimentation and scales new applications quickly

Moderator

Jason McNamara MD Taurus Group

Panellists

Rajesh Padmawar EM – Architecture The Salvation Army Australia