{ Case Study: JCON @ DEUTSCHE BANK }
From Your Desk to a World-Class Java Conference. Coffee in Hand.
How Deutsche Bank brought a JCON conference in-house and experienced what happens when world-class speakers meet a team’s everyday challenges.
{ CHALLENGE }
Keep the knowledge where it’s needed
External conferences are great. But they come with a catch: most of the knowledge never makes it back to the office. You return inspired and alone with these memories. Then your daily work floods your brain and the impressions fade fast.
For large organisations like Deutsche Bank, this is a real structural problem. With around 1,600+ software developers at their Berlin office, more than 100 of them Java specialists, sending entire teams to external events is not realistic. Travel costs, time away from work, organisational overhead: the numbers rarely add up. Especially when you consider that developers are not always the most enthusiastic travellers.
At the same time, the challenge is real. Java is evolving fast and topics like Virtual Threads, AI integration, security architecture and cloud-native patterns are no longer niche concerns. They are everyday business and teams have to keep with these technologies. Keeping hundreds of developers current on the tools they work with every day is a challenge that doesn’t solve itself.
{ THE IDEA }
The conference comes to you
The JCON team brings together Java Champions and internationally recognised experts with over 10 years of experience running large-scale conferences. JCON EUROPE alone draws 1,000+ attendees from 60+ countries. That same expertise and speaker network is what powers the in-house format.
The idea is straightforward: instead of sending developers to a conference, you bring the conference to them. With everything that entails: a carefully curated program, world-class speakers selected by a team that includes Java Champions, and a genuine commitment to delivering conference-level quality on your own premises.
Dmitry Yanter, Chief Technology Manager at Deutsche Bank and one of the co-organisers of the event, describes the core idea in a few words:
"We wanted teams to think outside the box. To hear from real people with real experience, not just look at slides."
Yanter oversees a global platform where numerous teams work with Java as their central tech stack. For him, the value of the format was immediately clear: JCON bridges the gap between what is possible and what actually reaches people in their day-to-day work. It unites the creators of the technology and the teams using it in production every day.
{ THE FORMAT }
One day, two worlds
JCON @ Deutsche Bank was deliberately structured in two parts.
The morning and afternoon belonged to Deutsche Bank’s developers. Six focused sessions, one conference-room, around 100 attendees per session. Top-tier technical content, delivered on their own premises. Only a few steps away from your desk, take the lift, and walk straight into it.
The program delivered on every level. Piotr Przybyl showed how to truly work with Virtual Threads in Java 21, not in theory but with live demos. Gerrit Grunwald tackled the long-standing JVM startup problem and explored how GraalVM and the new OpenJDK project CRaC each approach a solution. Marc Philipp, lead of the JUnit team and one of the most recognized figures in the Java world, presented JUnit 6 and the features he developed full-time thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund.
Markus Kett took a deep dive into high-performance in-memory data processing, Adam Bien delivered practical cloud-native patterns for modern enterprise Java, and Brian Vermeer ran a live-hacking session on security vulnerabilities in Java applications. The kind of session that sharpens attention in any room.
The session topics were not chosen at random. The JCON team, which includes Java Champions with deep roots in the international Java community, curates the schedule specifically for the host organization. The result is content that is technically rigorous and directly relevant to the challenges the team faces.
From 6:30 PM: doors open
As the afternoon wrapped up, the character of the event shifted. What had been an internal gathering became an open community event from 6:30 PM onwards. Deutsche Bank opened its doors to external guests and the evening took on a different energy entirely.
At its center was a moderated panel discussion: “AI and the Enterprise Codebase: Promise or Pitfall?” AI and its implications for large-scale software development was a topic Deutsche Bank was actively grappling with at the time. Having world-class experts on the premises created a rare opportunity: a candid, expert-led conversation directly relevant to the bank’s own strategic questions. The panel brought fresh perspectives from outside the organisation at exactly the right moment. Grounded, critical and close to reality.
Richard Fichtner’s talk on Java modernisation was a highlight of the evening. How do you bring a grown codebase into the present day without rewriting everything and without losing your team? For an organisation with decades of Java history, that question hits close to home.
Dmitry Zinkevich, who attended both parts of the event reflected on what stood out for him in the evening:
From 6:30 PM: doors open
As the afternoon wrapped up, the character of the event shifted. What had been an internal gathering became an open community event from 6:30 PM onwards. Deutsche Bank opened its doors to external guests and the evening took on a different energy entirely.
At its center was a moderated panel discussion: “AI and the Enterprise Codebase: Promise or Pitfall?” AI and its implications for large-scale software development was a topic Deutsche Bank was actively grappling with at the time. Having world-class experts on the premises created a rare opportunity: a candid, expert-led conversation directly relevant to the bank’s own strategic questions. The panel brought fresh perspectives from outside the organisation at exactly the right moment. Grounded, critical and close to reality.
Richard Fichtner’s talk on Java modernisation was a highlight of the evening. How do you bring a grown codebase into the present day without rewriting everything and without losing your team? For an organisation with decades of Java history, that question hits close to home.
Dmitry Zinkevich, who attended both parts of the event reflected on what stood out for him in the evening:
"Richard Fichtner’s talk on Java modernisation was the highlight for me. There will come a point where that becomes directly relevant, and I will be ready"
Networking followed until 10 PM. For Zinkevich, who values external events for the fresh perspectives and real-world insights they bring from outside his daily environment, it was exactly the right way to close the day.
{ RESULTS }
What lands with people
The real measure of an event is not the program. It is what happens afterwards. What stays? What changes? Aleksandr Kuznetsov, a Java developer in Deutsche Bank’s D2C (Dealer to Customer) division, heard about the event through the internal Java dev community. His verdict was straightforward:
"The sessions and the input were incredibly valuable! The in-house format won me over completely. I could integrate it perfectly into my working day."
What impressed him most was not only the content but the experience: a professionally run event on familiar ground, with none of the friction that comes with travelling to a conference. His personal highlight was Markus Kett’s session on high-performance in-memory data processing. He subscribed to Java Pro after the event.
Dmitry Zinkevich could only attend two sessions due to other commitments on the day. That in itself is an important point: the format allows flexible participation, fitting around whatever the working day demands.
"The great thing about this kind of event: you don’t have to go anywhere. Head downstairs and listen. Then talk it through with your colleagues afterwards. That is where the real value compounds."
Even where the technologies discussed cannot be applied directly by every team, due to the organisational realities of a large bank, the impulses travel with people. Into personal projects, future decisions, the next conversation with the team. That is how knowledge transfer actually works.
Dmitry Yanter sums up what makes the format stand apart:
"An incredible density of Java knowledge in a single room. That is extraordinary and hard to replicate."
That’s the core of it. Not the number of sessions or the length of the day, but the quality of what comes together on your premises. Speakers like Marc Philipp, the maintainer of JUnit, or Adam Bien, who has shaped enterprise Java architecture for decades: you do not get those people at an internal training day. They come to JCON and with the in-house format, they also come to you.
{ CONCLUSION }
Learning that stays with the team
JCON @ Deutsche Bank proved that conference-level quality and in-house events are not a contradiction. Quite the opposite: when both come together, something emerges that neither a standard training session nor an external conference can achieve on its own.
Developers learn from the best in the field, in the same room, with the same challenges at their backs. The conversations that follow, in the corridor or over lunch, are part of the format. They cannot be scaled, caught up on or replaced.
Deutsche Bank has shown what is possible. The concept is tried, tested and its impact is real: visible in engagement, in inspiration and in the concrete ideas that developers carry back to their desks.
The format is repeatable, scalable and ready for the next host!
Host your dedicated JCON
Instead of sending one or two engineers to an external conference, you can enable entire teams at once. With JCON at Your Organization, we bring the JCON format directly to your company.
Every organization is different.
Get in touch and we'll design an event tailored to your team, your challenges and your goals.