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

Darragh Kennedy Director, Software Engineering Zendesk 

• Why per-seat and per-token pricing hide the true cost of a deployment until you are already at scale
• How to measure cost per outcome rather than cost per task, including the failures and human rescues your dashboards do not show
• What to put in place before you scale an agent to thousands of users, not after the bill arrives

Every organisation wants to realise the promise of AI. The organisations succeeding are investing first in the foundations that make AI trustworthy, scalable and operationally sustainable.

Join us as we discuss how leading organisations are strengthening cyber resilience, modernising operations and building AI-ready platforms that balance governance, performance and innovation.

We'll share a practical framework for building trusted digital foundations, enabling intelligent operations through observability and automation, and ultimately delivering measurable industry outcomes through real customer examples.

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

Rajiv Shah Director Australian Information Security Association (AISA)

Panellists

Jason Smith Director, Enabling Technology Victoria University

Dom Pietrzy Cloud & Infrastructure Architecture Lead Victorian Government Department

Dilip Konar Former Application Service & Engineering Manager ex-Australia Post

Rajesh Padmawar EM – Architecture The Salvation Army Australia 

This presentation argues that organisations need to get ready now for automation and agentic AI by modernising network services across complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments. As CloudOps, NetOps and SecOps work across fragmented tools, partial asset inventories and inconsistent control planes, DNS, DHCP and IPAM become the platform layer that restores authoritative visibility, operational consistency and trusted data.

By unifying DDI, external exposure management and asset intelligence in one platform, teams can reduce outages, close security gaps and create the foundation required for scalable automation, policy-driven workflows and AI-assisted infrastructure operations. The message is simple: AI readiness does not start with agents, it starts with modern, unified network services that can reliably discover, govern and serve the assets those agents will depend on.

• 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

For decades, compliance has been treated as an audit problem. Review the environment, collect evidence, identify gaps, remediate findings, and repeat. That model worked when infrastructure changed slowly and risk emerged gradually.

Today's reality is very different.

Cloud platforms, AI adoption, platform engineering, and digital transformation have dramatically increased the speed and scale of infrastructure change. At the same time, AI is accelerating the discovery of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps, shrinking the time organisations have to understand exposure and take action. The challenge is no longer simply managing infrastructure. It's maintaining control as the pace of change and the pace of risk continue to increase.

In this session, Perforce Puppet challenges the notion that compliance should remain a periodic activity. We'll explore why organisations need to move beyond point-in-time assessment and adopt a more continuous approach to governance, visibility, and policy enforcement across modern infrastructure environments.

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

To stay competitive and become resilient to industry disruption, organizations must experiment rapidly to speed up innovation velocity. However, endless choices in cloud services and configuration options often increase risks and slow down the time-to-market. This presentation explores how opinionated architectures link infrastructure choices directly to business outcomes. The presentation provides insights into the challenges of traditional platforming and provisioning and explains the how certain application and agent use cases benefit from simplified more opinionated cloud platforms.

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

• Learn where cloud waste actually sits in 2026 — from proprietary database licensing and Kubernetes overprovisioning to AI inference growth — and how leading organisations are using agentic methods to reduce it continuously, not quarterly.

• Explore a practical operating model for “Agent FinOps”, including how platform engineering, FinOps, and AI-driven operations converge to improve governance, reduce technical debt, and accelerate migration away from proprietary stacks.

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.

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 

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

Catherine Zhang FinOps Lead Australian Federal Agency (former)

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

Jan Cutts EM – Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure nbn Australia