I recently sat down with Marco Eijsackers, ING’s Global Head of Tech Strategy, at their headquarters in Amsterdam. Serving over 40 million customers worldwide with an enterprise tech team of thousands of engineers, ING faces a core question shared by many enterprise IT leaders: How do you build a flexible tech strategy that embraces AI without locking yourself into a single vendor’s roadmap?
Our conversation focuses on the architecture of autonomy, exploring how ING balances scale, strict financial regulations, and rapid technology cycles, inviting fellow leaders to reflect on these themes.
- Tackling complexity with open standards: ING is streamlining legacy systems onto global, reusable platform capabilities. By relying on open source, Kubernetes, and standard APIs, they maintain fluidity across environments while eliminating vendor lock-in.
- Digital sovereignty by design: Navigating regulations like DORA requires a "cloud smart" approach. ING protects sensitive workloads on a private cloud while selectively leveraging public cloud providers for non-critical systems.
- Empowering engineers: Through their One Engineering System, ING provides developers with automated guardrails and "golden paths." Embedding compliance directly into workflows reduces provisioning times from hours to minutes.
- Preparing for an agent-first future: Beyond its current AI applications, such as its Vista platform, ING is establishing sandbox environments to safely experiment with agentic runtimes and new operating models.
When asked what advice he would give fellow technology executives, Marco offered a principle that resonated deeply with me:
"Be a bit stubborn on the vision you have, but flexible on the details of how to get there."
I’ve always shared a similar philosophy: strong opinions, weakly held. Have a firm conviction, but be open to changing your mind when presented with contrasting data. Whether you are navigating cloud migrations, boosting developer velocity, or preparing for enterprise AI, ING’s journey offers a valuable blueprint for modern IT strategy.
Watch our full conversation below.
关于作者
Ashesh Badani is Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Red Hat. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s overall product portfolio and business unit groups, including product strategy, business planning, product management, marketing, and operations across on-premise, public cloud, and edge. His product responsibilities include Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift®, Red Hat Ansible Automation, developer tools, and middleware, as well as emerging cloud services and experiences.
Previously, Badani was Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms, where he helped solidify the company as a hybrid cloud and enterprise Kubernetes leader. Under his leadership, Red Hat has also expanded OpenShift from an award-winning Platform-as-a-Service solution to the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, with 1,000+ customers spanning all regions and industries. Badani started at Red Hat overseeing product line management and marketing for the Red Hat JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform middleware portfolio.
Badani has played a significant role around strategy, analysis, and integration for key Red Hat acquisitions—including StackRox in 2021, CoreOS in 2018, and FuseSource in 2012—to bolster the company’s integration portfolio.
Prior to joining Red Hat, Badani served as Director of Product Management and Product Marketing of Integration and Application Platform Products at Sun Microsystems. He has more than 20 years of experience in the technology and finance industries at both established and emerging companies.
