DigiTalks: Digital Sovereignty with Sergiu Petean, former Allianz Executive and CEO of Innovation Sovereignty Advisors

In this episode, Adam Gaca sits down with Sergiu Petean, a former Allianz Executive and CEO of Innovation Sovereignty Advisors, to explore how European organisations can navigate the complex demands of compliance, innovation and global competition.

Drawing on years of industry experience, Sergiu explains how the push for EU technological sovereignty can become a strategic advantage.

He outlines how a clear approach to cloud, open source and AI can help organisations move from consuming technology to shaping it – strengthening data control while building resilience and commercial impact.

Adam Gaca: Hello everyone. In this IT Insights episode, we sit down with Sergiu Petean, an expert in financial services industry, a Director of Cloud Engineering and Operations at Allianz Direct, a contributor [to] Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a board member of European Resilience Summit, and CEO of Innovation Sovereignty Advisors. Our goal is to explore how Europe’s push for technological sovereignty is redefining the way organizations approach cloud, data, open source, and AI. Our guest argues that what’s often seen as [a] regulatory burden is in fact Europe’s greatest opportunity. Drawing on deep experience, he outlines how organizations can balance compliance, innovation, and global competition, turning sovereignty into strategic advantage. So, Sergiu, when you hear digital sovereignty in European context, what does it mean to you? Is it a defensive idea like data control, or is something more proactive like digital trust and the capacity to create and innovate? 

Sergiu Petean: So, for me, it’s clear. Um, sovereignty, digital sovereignty cannot be [a] defensive game. Has to be [an] offensive game. Um, right now in Europe, we are spending a lot of effort in somehow educating everyone to consume [in] a responsible way. Uh, and that’s not creating any… any kind of value. And it’s also competing, uh, I would say with a limited budget that we should actually spend on innovation, which I see something as… as offensive. And, um, I would say digital sovereignty as a whole, um, it’s about creating an environment of, uh, creators, an environment of innovation. And it has to be built, of course, on trust and transparency, especially in the European context. 

Adam Gaca: Thank you. Um, so why has this concept, which you have also linked to resilience, become such an urgent strategic priority for both the EU and European companies? Why now? 

Sergiu Petean: Yeah. Why not yesterday? Uh, it’s… it’s even a better… the question because we have seen sovereignty being strategically, you know, created by some states like China, you know, and other powerful nations out there. And Europe somehow decided not to act in the past. What happened, I would say lately, is that we finally realize how weak or exposed we are as European to any kind of fluctuation in the politics of our friends, uh, on the other side of the ocean. So right now sovereignty is becoming, um, as a whole… right… because when we speak about sovereignty, we speak about, uh, I would say state sovereignty, we speak about digital sovereignty, and then we speak about why not innovation sovereignty where we also have to, as European, have to drive our future, uh, the way we decide. 

And we have seen that the intersection of all these dimension of sovereignty are becoming very blurred. And we have an episode, uh, that recently happened in Romania where basically the presidential, uh, candidate that was a prime candidate more or less, uh, appeared out of nowhere. No one in the country actually knew about this guy and he was promoted and validated through digital platforms that were running on a different script than the Romanian, you know, uh, government or the… the Romanian, um, uh, nation. And that’s frightening because you realize that there is no sovereignty left in… in the non-digital space, you know, um, that cannot be influenced by these kind of forces. And if you can’t control those forces, then obviously you’re… you’re not driving the future of your nation or the future of your Europe at the end of the day. So I would say we have quite a few examples of why sovereignty and the digital sovereignty especially is top of our mind lately. 

Adam Gaca: I can help myself… um, since you’re coming from high regulated industry like insurance, how do you view Europe’s regulatory approach? You have AI Act, Data Act. Are there just compliance burden or, if used correctly, can they be a catalyst for a true innovation and resilience? 

Sergiu Petean: Yes and yes. I would say first of all, we have a lot of regulations coming over. And this is normal because it’s a reaction to a certain, um, exposure, to a certain fragility that Europe has. We recognize that we own little from the digital infrastructure and therefore we are very much concerned on how we consume those services coming from the digital space. But I would say the future has to move beyond this defensive game. Has… has to move towards an offensive approach where we recognize is that yes, now we have somehow now contain the… the exposure, but we have to now build a future where we are capable of starting owning all the infrastructure and the layers which are part of a real strategy around digital sovereignty. 

The best way maybe to describe this is through analogy. I normally like this to… to make a point. And the one I found this morning which I hope resonates with the whole conversation, it’s more about, uh, European nations trying now to build, uh, a tank, you know, for what’s coming next. We feel a danger coming over, you know, so we say let’s… let’s build a tank and let’s make sure that it’s very well armor because things will get rough a little bit now. But through the current approach of regulation, we are fully focused and obsessed with armor of a tank. We haven’t yet built the wheels for the tank. And no matter how good an armor is, we know that in times of disruptions, uh, you have to move, you have to innovate, you have to… to transform yourself. You can’t do that without wheels. I feel we are exactly in that situation right now. We are fully focused and obsessed with armor instead of designing a vehicle that moves fast and of course in a… in a safe way. 

Adam Gaca: So let’s switch to offensive then, um, and talk about tech. How critical are open-source and cloud-native principles for achieving that true digital sovereignty and avoiding vendor lock-in? 

Sergiu Petean: For me is the… is the only strategy that fits perfectly with where Europe is right now. If we look at the construction of Europe and the weaknesses and also of course the capabilities that we have, where we shine and where we lead, then we can easily see that Europe is a fragmented continent and that’s positive and negative at the same time. Uh, positive of course because you have different views, you have different cultures, you have different ways, you know, to integrate and create really a global product that reflects the value of everyone. But then because you’re fragmented, how do you get to a certain level of trust where everyone basically works together? 

And this is where open source has proven itself because it builds on fragmented innovation centers. It’s building a trust based on openness. So everything happen in plain sight. Um, and of course if you look at, um, the whole ecosystem around open source, I would say the socialist nature of Europe is creating something that I don’t see that often in other parts of the world. I mean with my role in CNCF, I… I had a chance to experience open source in different cultures and different regions. But the number of maintainers and contributors of open source in… in Europe are… are one of the highest and maybe also the best skilled developers you can find. Mostly because you have time for hobbies. Europeans, engineers, have time for hobbies because in the end we are socially systems in most of the countries and that if you’re like a geek and you like engineering, your hobby is going to happen most likely on projects in open source. 

So if you take that legacy, you know, and that… that culture that we have and those way of living in Europe and then you mix it with the fragmentation and also with a need of creating a trustful relationship in open, then I would say open source is the right way to go. And there is so much innovation already built. And if you look around in enterprises around Europe, you’re going to find that at least on the cloud stack, probably 90, 95% of all the… the dependencies and all the software we are using, all the tools we are using are already coming from open source. We just haven’t yet created a structure to really strategize the approach to open source and maximize, um, our influence in those projects and of course maximize the value they can generate in our organizations. 

Adam Gaca: So that sounds very pragmatic I would say, and that leads me to another question. Can European enterprises be sovereign and still work with global hyperscalers? Isn’t this a contradiction? 

Sergiu Petean: I… I hope not. I… I mean if we look around we… we have already a huge investment on both sides, you know, on the hyperscale but also in European data centers and enterprises in different technologies. Decoupling that it would be crazy, I would say, and we would lose so much innovation. Plus you look at hyperscaler and you’re going to see that most of their engineers in Europe are actually Europeans. There is so much knowledge that they collected and the quality they have and the services they have created sometimes even on open source, you know, are some of the highest quality you can get in the space. 

So obviously a marriage between the European interest where European voice and interest really are the one dominating the conversation and all the other capabilities that already exist in the… in the hyperscaler environment. That would be the right way to go. Of course, again going back and linking all this to… to open source and recognizing that even hyperscalers are right now building a lot… a lot of open source because they need, you know, this power of innovation. Because it doesn’t matter how big you are now, AWS, Microsoft and… and Google, you might be having ten of thousands of superb engineers but you still cannot move in all directions and you cannot move with the speed of a million kind of community size that comes from open source. So they already decided long time ago to, you know, to ride the cycle of innovation of open source because it’s the fastest you can get when you have so many perspectives and so much quality being generated by… by maintainers, no, which are top engineers on… on every single domain that you can imagine. So if you imagine a situation where you have a strategy towards open source and you marriage of course the hyperscaler with data center and priv… private clouds from Europe, that would be a perfect, um, perfect marriage. But the strategy has to be multi-year and has to be driven by European interest of course. 

Adam Gaca: Okay. So you touch a lot about, uh, creators and communities and this has moved me into direction of creator mindset. So what are the practical frameworks or creative structures, uh, that you see are essential for making this work as, uh, on European level? 

Sergiu Petean: This is, uh… I love this question. Thank you for… thank you for the question because I spent the last five years actually trying to answer the same question. And I through… through my journey and, you know, I’m… my expertise sits at the intersection of open source, of sovereignty, and enterprise. In an enterprise, I tried to create a certain mentality about being a creator, not a consumer. So for me, finding the balance between where you should consume, when… when you should create on a personal level, but then on a team level, then on an enterprise level and organization level. There was quite… quite a journey. And what I found very useful is that first of all, leaders, they have to recognize that technology is the space and the digital realm is the space where innovation is being produced now. You know, I mean if you read the news, most of, maybe nine out of 10 news about innovation are happening in the digital space. You have an AI model that it’s helping with drugs discovery or you have, I don’t know, quantum computer coming and changing the way we see the world and we understand the universe. No? So that’s where in that realm is where innovation is happening. 

And if that’s the case, we can only expect that also innovation in business happening also in digital realm. Which then goes to the basic question: why doesn’t every single European company has a strategic view around technology? Why technology is still treated as a cost center after so many years and after realizing all these… these forces which are now being just amplified by the… by the AI revolution? So that’s… that’s a little bit strange to me, you know. Then again, I’m going again crossing towards the… the open source and when you realize that you have more open models, LLMs in open than in closed environments and you have 95% of the clouds technology being built in open source, then obviously if you’re a leader in an industry and you have a strategy around technology, you simply cannot ignore open source strategy. 

And the way to do that it’s really first of all understanding the impact on your… on your environment, on your enterprise, and then making sure that you have a strategic approach to it. Um, the industry already answered that question. The constructs around it is called OPO or Open Program… um, Open Source Program Office. And this is the place where you bring experts from legal, from, I don’t know, open source and also from other engineering departments and you put them together and say, let’s make sure that the innovation comes from open source, it’s in the benefit and of our organization and is being driven by us. We have a word, a strong word in how the roadmap of those critical projects are being addressed and are being evolved, um, and we are reflected in anything that the future is… is asking from those. 

Adam Gaca: That’s a very good answer. And I think there is not a one correct… um, so we went through the perspective of community and the meaning of open source when it comes to, uh, sovereignty. Let’s switch the lens to business now. So beyond just compliance, what are the business cases for resilience? How can this innovation sovereignty we are discussing, uh, become a really competit… competitive differentiation in sectors like insurance, finance, healthcare? 

Sergiu Petean: I would say it’s the only way you can really innovate today. Maybe I’m a little bit biased on this one but, um, what I call now innovation sovereignty, which is the capacity to create, it’s something that every single leader in the industry should think about, especially if you focus it’s on being a digital player. And who is not a digital player today? So I say most of the leaders have to ask themselves how can they maximize, you know, the capabilities of every single IT innovation coming over. And we had the cloud innovation. What did we do? How many platforms do we currently have in enterprise in Europe actually being as successful? I… I can… it’s a rhetoric question because I was looking around, not so many. But the question is, or the positive answer here is that there are still some successful stories. 

Um, then AI now is coming. What do we do? Do we follow the same, you know, play script that we had in the past and we don’t learn from our mistakes and we don’t reincorporate all the learnings that we had, all the wisdom we collected over the past years? I’m afraid answer is yes. We… we repeat the same problems and we repeat the same poor decisions that we made in the past. And the root cause for that is the deprioritization of the capacity to create. So we never struggle to get ourselves to have this innovation sovereignty in the first place because that comes with a strategic view, a multi-year KPI on building talent in-house and giving them the… the capability to… to grow themselves and really capture most of the values that technology is bringing over. 

I can tell you that through my journey I managed to maybe be lucky enough to construct a platform that was built on open source and was driven from the beginning by the principle of innovation sovereignty where I prioritized the crea… creation and retention of a very talented team that was capable not just to build a group standard and a very cheap one and very efficient and very resilient. We were… we had more than 20 audits and all the finding were perfect. And actually at one point I was invited by the… by the group auditing team to have a conversation with them and a presentation in front of every auditor in the company to show them that good technology it’s not an enemy of compliance but actually the opposite is. Because all the questions and all the proofs that compliance officer might have have been already somehow answered by the cloud native technologies in that, uh, in that regard now. So things are very much possible today but in order to access this level of… of innovation and resilience then you have to have this multi-year KPI and a certain vision for what sovereignty means for your enterprise. 

Adam Gaca: Okay, that… that definitely sounds impressive what you have done with your team and I think the biggest change was to… to scale up the creator’s capabilities, create being creative with your organization. So let’s assume I’m one of the executives watching this video right now, listening, and what would be the first practical step you recommend to take to embed this creator mindset into the digital strategy? 

Sergiu Petean: I would have more things to say but probably the first thing would be to stop treating technology and IT as a cost center. That’s not the way value is going to be created in the future. And you’re missing out on capturing all the innovations and all the wisdom and the particular knowledge and expertise that your company actually has. No, because every single company has a certain substance, you know, that they have to digitalize. You cannot outsource that to anyone else. So, in order to, I don’t know, build a cloud platform on top of that, build an AI model on top of that, you need internal people to really understand and really translate that into your values of… of your company. 

So my advice would be invest in technology. Uh, don’t expect and don’t force technology people to speak just the business language. Also you as a business leader, you should start talking understanding the technical language because that’s probably the space where you have to have this conversation. The conversation doesn’t have to happen necessary in technology, not necessarily in… in business, but at the intersection of those two realms and they have to be much together in one single vision. And ideally not a one-year vision where financial KPIs are the only things you’re measuring. You should have KPIs for sovereignty, for technical capabilities, and of course for whatever, um, revolution you’re now going through. 

Adam Gaca: I think those are great advices. Uh, I would like to drop the present and… and move into the future. Tap into your wisdom. So looking ahead 5 to 10 years with Europe, will Europe succeed in this mission? Will we truly become a creator and not just consumer of technology? 

Sergiu Petean: I would like to think yes. This is possible. I… if I would to project a little bit the next five years, I hope that in the next six months or so, Europe will wake up. There are a lot of signs of this already happening. I mean, I’m part of the European Summit Resilience and I can tell you the… the diversity and the quality of the people asking the right questions and the concern they’re having, it’s absolutely extraordinary. And you see this movement, you know, just… just flourishing every single day. So, there is a lot of hungry… there is a lot of hungry people in Europe looking really at the right problem… problems. Now this moment probably will initiate, uh, some political changes as well and those political changes will also impose a certain regulation. Because at the end regulation Europe it’s… it’s a fight for sovereignty. You know, you have companies which are exposed and maybe governed by different forces because you’re a public company, you know, public listed that anyone could have talks and equity in a company. So regulation it’s a form for the states, European form of imposing a certain level of sovereignty. 

So with these changes coming and having the right now, right compliance in place imposed to different organization and the right regulation and again moving from defensive to offensive, and demand for example every single company to have an OPO, why not have an OSO, a mandatory OSO? And then make sure that they make a minimum investment in open source and in technical capabilities and those OSOs will be federated and maybe, I don’t know, governed centrally by a central OSPO that creates a strategy for the whole Europe on open source and technology. And with that level of… of regulation and the level of investment on every single enterprise, I would say in one and a half years we could see massive investments and massive improvements in the whole ecosystems that is now being, you know, more or less analyzed in Europe. 

So I’m very optimistic. We… we have all the ingredients to cook our own recipe of sovereignty and we can go even beyond that. Because right now we have several flavors of sovereignty, now. We have, uh, the American one, the Chinese one. They are very strong military and also digital sovereignty wise they are leading the innovations but they are like close… you know, legacy kind of sovereignty. You’re either one or the other one and give up your… your values. What Europe can… can do with this approach towards innovation through open source, it’s really building a flavor of open source, um, and democratic sovereignty model that any other states in… around the world can… can make it part of their strategy. Imagine Canada now. They’re sitting between Russia and United States but they want to have their own sovereignty. They’re too small to build it by themselves. But why don’t we have an open sovereignty, open democratic sovereignty led of course by Europe because it’s one of the biggest forces and then you are an exporter of sovereignty for the rest of the world. So Europe cannot just survive, you know. We can become resilient in time of distrust and of course we can become an inspirational type of sovereignty for everyone else out there trying to… to go to the same journey. 

Adam Gaca: Sergiu, thanks for opening the window to the future. Um, as a final takeaway, if you could just summarize your core message into one sentence, what is the one thing European business leaders must remember about digital sovereignty? 

Sergiu Petean: I would say digital sovereignty and sovereignty in general, it’s not about the walls we are building. It’s not about, you know, the armor we are building. It’s about the trust we have in each other, in our processes and in our network. It’s about the things we are creating and of course the courage we have to actually lead our way to the future. 

Adam Gaca: Thank you Sergiu. Thank you everyone for tuning in. If you have any more questions, if you like to explore the topic more of digital sovereignty and beyond, do let us know.