Tom Linckens

Tom Linckens is a Senior Advisor and Board Member for all Digital Transformation matters who has mastered complexity and helps identify pragmatic solutions to transform organizations. As the first Group CIO of Europe’s leading media and entertainment conglomerate Bertelsmann SE&Co KgaA, Tom and his team modernized network, security, workplace, and cloud-computing infrastructure to enable fast-paced growth and transformation across more than 500 operating companies. While at Henkel (FMCG Champion with 20B topline), Tom leveraged Zscaler to enable decentralized web access for a 50K seat MS Office 365 deployment. Zscaler became one of the few Growth-Partners at Bertelsmann, and allowed them to leverage the cloud as a fully scalable environment.

Media and entertainment is definitely an industry that has faced the biggest changes—driven by technology and changing user behavior. Whether your priority is innovating or following-fast, speed is essential and requires building partnerships within your organization. You cannot remain in a "do-it-yourself" mode within your technology department. Partners like Zscaler, Microsoft, and AWS have demonstrated an unprecedented ability for IT departments to create value for their customers instead of having to struggle to meet benchmarks in secure infrastructure provisioning. The companies that struggled the least during the COVID-19 pandemic were the ones that decided early to engage in these types of partnerships and allowed for the virtualization of security and workplace services. Many of my clients only understood the full benefits of virtualization when they had to quickly virtualize their full operations wherever possible. Now they are accelerating these partnerships across the board.