Klaus Koefoed spent more than 25 years in IT services and consultancy, at Capgemini, Deloitte, and Accenture, before taking over as CEO of T-Systems in Northern Europe. In this episode of the Smooth Scaling Podcast, Klaus walks host Jose Quaresma through the rise of sovereign cloud: why a theme almost nobody raised two years ago turned urgent in early 2025, and what actually changed. They get into Europe's real position against the American hyperscalers, why the answer is rarely either/or, and how leaders should weigh the data, operational, technology, and legal layers of sovereignty. Klaus is candid that none of this comes for free. Multi-cloud adds complexity, and the right answer depends entirely on who you are. The back half turns to sovereign AI, where T-Systems and NVIDIA have stood up a billion-euro Industrial AI Cloud, and where Europe's gigafactory ambitions, real use cases like simulated wind tunnels, and AI Scrum Teams come in. A grounded, practical look at building and running infrastructure when geopolitics is suddenly part of the architecture.

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• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:46) - From consulting to running T-Systems
• (01:45) - When sovereignty went from niche to urgent
• (03:54) - Where Europe stands: strengths and gaps
• (06:50) - "Let's not be lemmings": a balanced approach
• (08:32) - SaaS, optionality, and freedom of movement
• (12:06) - The what-if scenarios CIOs miss
• (14:00) - The levels of sovereignty: data, ops, tech, legal
• (16:21) - How to actually evaluate European options
• (20:38) - Treat your cloud like an insurance review
• (23:08) - Hybrid, multi-cloud, and the move back to private
• (27:50) - Sovereign AI and Europe's alternatives
• (30:09) - Real use cases: digital twins and wind tunnels
• (38:07) - Gigafactories and AI Scrum Teams
• (40:21) - Rapid fire: resources and "scalability is..."

Klaus Koefoed is CEO of T-Systems Northern Europe, leading Deutsche Telekom's B2B IT-service business across the Nordics, UK and Ireland. He joined T-Systems in June 2023 from Capgemini, where he was VP and Nordic Head of Cloud Strategy & Transformation Advisory. Before that, he was a Partner at Deloitte Consulting, with earlier years at Accenture. Copenhagen-based, with 25+ years in IT services and consultancy. His move from advising to operating arrived just as digital sovereignty stopped being a compliance footnote and became a board-level resilience question. Under Klaus, T-Systems Northern Europe has pushed hard on Sovereign Solutions for Europe and especially T Cloud Public (formerly known as Open Telekom Cloud) — now ten years old enterprise grade European Public Cloud — and recently opened the Industrial AI Cloud, Europe's largest sovereign AI-infrastructure, with 10,000 GPUs connected to the existing portfolio. That makes him one of very few executives in the region who can credibly talk about running sovereign cloud and sovereign AI at scale in Europe.

🔗 Connect
Klaus Koefoed: https://www.linkedin.com/in/klauskoefoed/
Host José Quaresma: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-quaresma/

This podcast is researched by Joseph Thwaites, produced by Perseu Mandillo, and brought to you by Queue-it, your virtual waiting room partner.

© Queue-it, 2026

Sam Dhar has spent 14 years building infrastructure at Cisco, Amazon Alexa, and Adobe, and now works as Senior Staff Engineer and AI infrastructure leader at Galileo, the enterprise AI evaluation platform. In this episode of the Smooth Scaling Podcast, Sam walks host Jose Quaresma through Cloud Prem: deploying your full product stack inside the customer's own cloud environment instead of running it as SaaS. They get into why the model is resurging, and it mostly comes down to data. Enterprises want ownership and control, plus a heavy compliance load (SOC 2, HIPAA, fully air-gapped government workloads), and they do not want a vendor sitting in the read path of their most sensitive data. Sam is candid about the hard parts. Cloud Prem can be a losing game on margins, deployment is the slowest thing in the pipeline, and every customer environment is different enough to reset the work. The conversation closes on AI: why it makes Cloud Prem urgent, the brutal GPU shortage, and why self-hosting an Opus-class model is still out of reach for most companies. A direct, practitioner-level look at where enterprise AI infrastructure is actually heading.

Episode page

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• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:08) - What Cloud Prem actually is
• (06:05) - Why Cloud Prem is resurging now
• (09:37) - Provider, vendor, customer: who owns what
• (11:10) - "Data is paramount": the compliance driver
• (14:29) - Shipping software into someone else's environment
• (19:57) - When Cloud Prem becomes a losing game
• (26:48) - Quality, and the control plane / data plane split
• (28:50) - Monitoring without seeing the customer's data
• (30:52) - Why Sam moved to AI evals
• (34:56) - Self-hosting LLMs and the GPU bottleneck
• (38:01) - Smaller runtimes, frontier-level intelligence
• (41:46) - Why AI makes Cloud Prem urgent
• (46:59) - Rapid fire: the one book to read
• (49:01) - "Business equals scalability"

Satyam “Sam” Dhar is a senior Staff Engineer and AI infrastructure leader at Galileo, where he designs systems that support real-time LLM workflows at enterprise scale. Prior to Galileo, he spent over six years at Adobe, contributing to AI-powered product development, evaluation platforms, and large-scale data systems. Earlier in his career at Amazon, he worked on high-throughput distributed services supporting Alexa’s device orchestration. Based in San Francisco, Sam’s insights and commentary have been featured in Newsweek, CNET, InfoQ, The New Stack, The Deep View, and others. He is also a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

🔗 Connect
Sam Dhar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyamdhar/
Host José Quaresma: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-quaresma/

This podcast is researched by Joseph Thwaites, produced by Perseu Mandillo, and brought to you by Queue-it, your virtual waiting room partner.

© Queue-it, 2026

Chris Nesbitt-Smith has been running Kubernetes in production since version 0.4 — long before pods, before managed services, before most of today's tooling existed. In this episode of Smooth Scaling, he sits down with José Quaresma to share what a decade of running Kubernetes for UK government citizen-facing services has taught him about scaling critical infrastructure. The conversation covers why Kubernetes was the least bad option (and largely still is), why relying on autoscaling means you've already lost, and how Gregor Hohpe's "guardrails versus lane assist" metaphor changes the way you think about capacity. Chris makes the case for climbing the service stack — SaaS first, then Functions as a Service, then Platform as a Service, and only reluctantly managed Kubernetes — and explains why tech is one of the only industries that builds critical systems without ever pricing the risk of failure. A direct, opinionated look at what scaling really demands when the stakes are real and the budget isn't infinite.

Episode page

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• (00:01) - Intro
• (01:23) - Running Kubernetes since v0.4 in UK government
• (04:56) - Why pod rescheduling went full circle
• (09:07) - "Brave and stupid": running alpha-stage K8s in production
• (14:58) - Helm, DevOps as a job title, and cultural drift
• (16:43) - Climb the service stack (SaaS → FaaS → PaaS → managed K8s)
• (20:48) - Why engineers resist giving up control
• (23:52) - Tech doesn't quantify risk the way every other industry does
• (27:14) - If you're relying on autoscaling, it's already too late
• (28:30) - The KubeCon Black Friday game: dropping requests as strategy
• (33:03) - Graceful degradation up the stack
• (35:34) - "Mostly myths": data sovereignty vs. data residency
• (38:35) - Cloudflare and "deploy to the world" as a different paradigm
• (41:53) - The legacy debt sitting in UK public sector tech
• (46:03) - Rapid-fire: build advice, recommended reading, scalability is...

Chris Nesbitt-Smith is an independent technology strategist, a Kubernetes instructor at LearnKube, and the architect of the UK Government's National Digital Exchange. Based in London, he works at the intersection of policy, security, and modern infrastructure — advising UK and international government departments, multinational enterprises, and large NGOs on cloud-native transformation and DevSecOps. A regular speaker at KubeCon, DevSecCon, and Open Source Summit, his talks span container security, policy-as-versioned-code, and platform engineering. He also blogs regularly on his blog Cloudy with Chance of Freefall.

🔗 Connect
Guest Chris Nesbitt-Smith: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/cnesbittsmith
Host José Quaresma: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-quaresma/

This podcast is researched by Joseph Thwaites, produced by Perseu Mandillo, and brought to you by Queue-it, your virtual waiting room partner.

© Queue-it, 2026