Welcome to our Thought Leader Event Series: 
Netlight EDGExcellence 2025

WTFuture?! - Get Ready for Innovation and Modernisation 

On June 5th you are getting ready for the future and Netlight Munich is your tour guide. EDGExcellence is Netlight’s evening dedicated to the people shaping tomorrow: product pioneers, tech strategists, design visionaries. For one night only, we're bringing together 200+ top decision-makers and experts across industries to explore one shared mission: navigating real transformation. How are you modernising your organisation, your architecture, you name it. We're tackling the most pressing questions of today and diving into the innovations of tomorrow.

HIGHLIGHTS

Rebuilding a Major FinTech Platform for the Future: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Osman Agirbas / Managing Director Digital Products & Technology at Interhyp

This is not just another classic “Monolith-to-Microservices” presentation, but a real-life, down-to-earth account of the lessons learned, and mistakes made during our journey over the past few years. Is it really better to start small and risk-free? How feasible are incremental migration plans? Where should you limit the highly beneficial team autonomy before it becomes too costly? Should you combine the technical migration with a redesign of business processes? Should you migrate from on-premises to the cloud at the same time? Questions like these are hard to answer and, as a result, pose significant risks to a successful migration. We will explore these and other questions to demystify some common misconceptions on the topic, providing a firsthand account of our experience migrating our 25-year-old monolith, which has been the 6-million-LOC digital foundation of our business success.

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Is Generative AI the key to unlocking next-gen IT Development?

Florian Gatzlaff / GenAI Expert at Netlight

In collaboration with the Friedrich Alexander University Research Lab for the Future of Work, we’re taking a close look at how Generative AI is changing the way IT professionals, teams, and organizations work. In this talk, we’ll introduce the AI Composer / Human Composer Framework and show how it could completely change the way we approach IT development. This is all about understanding how AI is shaping the future of IT, driving innovation, and transforming the way we think about work in this field.

Read more

European Cloud Alternatives: an overview and some opinions

Georg Kalus & Simon Klimaschka & Jakob Kempter, Cloud Experts at Netlight

Join us if you want to understand your options in the European cloud landscape.

We want to share some insights and learnings from researching European cloud vendors: what does the landscape look like? What is their service offering? How is the experience from working with them? How do they compare in pricing? We aim to benchmark European cloud providers to get a feeling for strengths and limitations.

Read more

REQUEST INVITE

🌟 What to expect 🌟

  • A 🤯 keynote that will change how you think about Rebuilding Platforms by Osman Agirbas - Managing Director Digital Products & Technology at Interhyp Gruppe

  • Pick your path with 4 tracks, each offering 3 sessions that flow from one to the next. WTOrg?! WTLegacy?! WTProduct?! or WTDeep?! — you’ll be diving through an insightful and connected journey!

  • Between these brain-teasing talks and inspiring discussions, be ready for actual WTF moments and surprises, allowing you to regain energy today and prepare for a successful tomorrow.

 

You’ll leave with sharper insights, new connections, and at least one idea you’ll want to run with.

We think you would be a great enrichment for the evening.

Organized & Hosted by

Netlight Consulting
@netlightconsulting

Netlight is a leading digital consultant company of 2 000 role models making aspiring digital leaders successful. Providing a full range of consultancy services from technology and design to data and management. Netlight has been awarded several times as top employer, as well as for growth, continued profitability and engagement for equality and diversity within the IT industry. Located in Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Zurich, Cologne and Amsterdam.

Agenda

5.30 pm - Welcome Apéro, Food and Connecting

6.00 pm - Introduction & Key Note by Osman Agirbas

6.45 pm - First Session: Sense

7.30 pm - Second Session: Digest

8.15 pm - Third Session: Respond

8.45 pm - Mingle & Experience

© MapTiler © OpenStreetMap contributors

About the talks

Rebuilding a Major FinTech Platform for the Future: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Osman Agirbas / Managing Director Digital Products & Technology at Interhyp

This is not just another classic “Monolith-to-Microservices” presentation, but a real-life, down-to-earth account of the lessons learned, and mistakes made during our journey over the past few years. Is it really better to start small and risk-free? How feasible are incremental migration plans? Where should you limit the highly beneficial team autonomy before it becomes too costly? Should you combine the technical migration with a redesign of business processes? Should you migrate from on-premises to the cloud at the same time? Questions like these are hard to answer and, as a result, pose significant risks to a successful migration. We will explore these and other questions to demystify some common misconceptions on the topic, providing a firsthand account of our experience migrating our 25-year-old monolith, which has been the 6-million-LOC digital foundation of our business success.

Read more

Building Business Resilience through Twin Transformation

Vanesa Camila Nicora & Valentin Aman, ESG Requirement Engineer & Project Manager & Co-Founder ESG-X & Sustainability Wizard

The twin transformation—combining digital innovation with sustainability—is key to building resilience in today’s uncertain world. By harnessing technologies like AI, data analytics, and automation, organizations can anticipate disruptions, adapt faster, and operate more efficiently. At the same time, embedding sustainability into core strategies through ESG integration reduces risk and unlocks long-term value. This talk, facilitated by ESG-X, will equip you with practical tools and proven methods to align digital transformation with your ESG goals. As a leading ESG tech company, ESG-X brings deep expertise in regulatory frameworks, advanced scenario modeling, and data-driven strategy, making ESG-X the ideal partner for this talk.

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Modernisation Unlocked: When, Why, and How to Level Up Your Software

Julian Geistbeck & Christoph Eichelberger, Architect Experts at Netlight

Legacy systems can quickly become roadblocker to a company's changing strategy to stay competitive in the market. A proper plan for tackling this modernisation is therefore a key success factor. We will dive with you into Netlight's software modernisation framework and shed light on different aspects that influence whether your modenisation will be a success or failure.

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Turning Flow into Growth - Effective Change Management

Djavad Hedayati & Kevin Husell, Change Management Experts at Netlight

In this talk, we share the transformation journey of the fulfilment in one of Germany’s largest shoe resellers. It pivoted from legacy self-built systems to a modular, composable commerce architecture and and a modern product organisation.We’ll walk through how we cut onboarding time for new carriers from six months to two weeks, enabled self-service for document changes, and replaced unreliable label generation with a highly available, vendor-integrated service. At the heart of the challenge was an outdated application (“printmachine”) with no ownership and only three people maintaining it — a situation that demanded both technical and organizational rethinking.This session is for product and engineering leaders navigating modernization in enterprise-scale systems. We’ll close with learnings on integrating legacy teams with new structures — and what it really means to build product in the middle of transformation.

Read more

Is Generative AI the key to unlocking next-gen IT Development?

Florian Gatzlaff / GenAI Expert at Netlight

In collaboration with the Friedrich Alexander University Research Lab for the Future of Work, we’re taking a close look at how Generative AI is changing the way IT professionals, teams, and organizations work. In this talk, we’ll introduce the AI Composer / Human Composer Framework and show how it could completely change the way we approach IT development. This is all about understanding how AI is shaping the future of IT, driving innovation, and transforming the way we think about work in this field.

Read more

Maximize Impact, Minimize Costs - Aligning Product Strategy & Organizational Structures

Lisa Sandleben & Jan Dominik Koch, OrgDev Experts at Netlight

In today’s fast-paced world, translating high-level business goals and your vision into actionable product strategies is more critical than ever. But how do you ensure that your organisation is structured for efficiency and success—especially with tight budgets and the pressure to deliver more with less?We’ll explore the journey from defining a good product strategy to building a decision stack, with a focus on how to prioritise and deliver value - even in the face of organisational and leadership challenges.

What to Expect:

Product Strategy Creation: Learn how to create a coherent and focused strategy that inspires and guides your product organisation.

Prioritising Initiatives for Maximum Impact: Discover how to focus your resources on the right initiatives that drive your company's mission.

Organisational Redesign: Understand how to create an efficient, cost-effective product operating model—even when leadership capacity is stretched thin.

Main Takeaways:- A practical approach to translating high-level goals into product strategies that deliver.

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Hands-on: Multi-cloud Kubernetes w/ European vendors

Alina Ruf & Moritz Gnisia, Cloud Experts at Netlight

Adopting a multi-cloud strategy offers flexibility and resilience, but managing Kubernetes across diverse platforms remains complex. This hands-on session explores deploying and operating Kubernetes clusters in a multi-cloud architecture using key European cloud providers like OVHcloud, Scaleway or Stackit. We will also have a look at the GKE Enterprise Features and how one can utilize it for an hybrid approach.Through a comprehensive showcase of a multi-cloud Kubernetes architecture, we’ll cover workload configuration, ensuring portability, and addressing critical security and compliance challenges such as data sovereignty. By the end, attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of strategic considerations for leveraging European vendors for their cloud architecture. We are looking forward for fruitful discussions and how to address real world problems.

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Cobol Cleanup Crew: War stories from modernizing a 40+ year old core banking system

Udo Klimaschewski (Solution Architecture Manager @ Objectway) & Charlotte Skilandat & Florian Schmidt, Lead Software Engineer Experts at Netlight

Modernizing a 40+ year old core banking system written in COBOL may seem like attempting open-heart surgery on the beating heart of a financial institution. Through a series of “war stories”, we’ll recount our journey tackling this engineering challenge. We will explore the daunting first steps of navigating a codebase with millions of lines of COBOL and addressing deeply ingrained performance bottlenecks which have resisted decades of change. We’ll share how we approached surgical, high-impact changes using a combination of incremental modernization, creative regression test frameworks, and a practical "modern meets legacy" architectural strategy. While this isn’t a story about revolutionary change or rewriting COBOL to Java overnight, it’s one of learning to respect the old world while carefully integrating it with the new. Join us as we unpack technical, strategic, and people-driven lessons, from building trust with reluctant teams to aligning modernization with long-term company strategy—all told with a dose of humor and humility.

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The Future is FLOW: How to assess your organisation to achieve productivity and outcomes

Ekaterina Sebina & Johan Hosk, Product Manager & Org Developers at Netlight

Through Flow Engineering frameworks and value stream mapping techniques, they'll demonstrate how to accurately diagnose organizational friction points and design a future state that genuinely improves outcomes. This talk cuts through transformation hype to deliver practical assessment tools that help you identify real needs, optimal timing, and meaningful targets for change. Perfect for leaders tired of change for change's sake who want evidence-based approaches to organizational evolution.

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From Oops to Ops: How operational excellence unlocks future-proof growth

Maria Litovskaya & Selina Irmen, Product Experts at Netlight

Discover how Product and Design Operations serve as the backbone of scalable organizations. This interactive session will provide actionable insights on building operational foundations, exploring practical ways to get started, and tailoring setups to fit diverse company needs. Transform your "oops" moments into seamless "ops" and find a way for sustainable growth in these domains.

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The Story of Killing the Printmachine: Modernizing Europewide Delivery through Product Leadership

Leon Jordans & Matthias Schneider, Product Manager & Solution Architect at Netlight

In this talk, we share the transformation journey of the fulfilment in one of Germany’s largest shoe resellers. It pivoted from legacy self-built systems to a modular, composable commerce architecture and and a modern product organisation.We’ll walk through how we cut onboarding time for new carriers from six months to two weeks, enabled self-service for document changes, and replaced unreliable label generation with a highly available, vendor-integrated service. At the heart of the challenge was an outdated application (“printmachine”) with no ownership and only three people maintaining it — a situation that demanded both technical and organizational rethinking.This session is for product and engineering leaders navigating modernization in enterprise-scale systems. We’ll close with learnings on integrating legacy teams with new structures — and what it really means to build product in the middle of transformation.

Read more

European Cloud Alternatives: an overview and some opinions

Georg Kalus & Simon Klimaschka & Jakob Kempter, Cloud Experts at Netlight

Join us if you want to understand your options in the European cloud landscape.

We want to share some insights and learnings from researching European cloud vendors: what does the landscape look like? What is their service offering? How is the experience from working with them? How do they compare in pricing? We aim to benchmark European cloud providers to get a feeling for strengths and limitations.

Read more

Enhancing Content Creation with GenAI: A Dual Approach to Information and Instruction Management

Dr. Alexander Urich (Technical Product Owner AI Infrastructure @ ZEISS) & Festina Ismali, Data & GenAI Expert at Netlight

In the realm of generative AI, particularly within marketing, the challenge lies in ensuring that AI agents produce content that is both factually correct and aligned with company guidelines, such as the brand guidelines of ZEISS. To address this, we propose a solution that not only dynamically selects the most relevant (product) information based on user input but also identifies the necessary instructions for the AI agent to process it through the powerful concept of tool calling. Given the constraints of large language models' context windows, our approach ensures that the AI agent is not overwhelmed with excessive information and instructions, which can diminish the quality of the generated text. Furthermore, we introduce an integrated automatic fact-checking mechanism that verifies the generated content against the provided approved information and instructions to safeguard against hallucinations and information mix-up. Taking an innovative approach, we developed the fact-checking mechanism based on collected feedback from human subject matter experts. We apply this dual approach in the GenAI MarketingHub of MED, where it not only enhances the quality of AI-generated marketing text but also reinforces adherence to brand standards.

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Lessons learned moving between games and finance

Ivan Milles & Jesper Blomqvist, Game Experts at Netlight

Our consultant careers have let us move between industries. Stockholm, our home base, is a global hub for games development, but we have both switched in and out of other industries and built some very special careers. We will talk about what we bring from the games industry to fintech clients - and what we bring from fintech clients back to the games industry.

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