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Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
Italy Sep 25, 2025 Invitation Only Physical italian
Nel percorso verso l’AI e la trasformazione digitale, dati e automazione sono gli elementi centrali di ogni strategia tecnologica. Ma senza una governance chiara, rischiano di diventare non solo fonte di inefficienza, ma anche di rischi e incoerenza. Come garantire che i dati siano completi, accessibili e affidabili? Come automatizzare le operation IT e i processi aziendali mantenendo controllo, compliance e sicurezza? Durante questa roundtable esclusiva, organizzata da CIONET Italia e IBM, affronteremo: La governance come abilitatore di dati affidabili e automazione sicura. Come prepararsi a un’adozione dell’AI realmente scalabile. Il ruolo di controllo, resilienza e gestione del rischio nell’innovazione.
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Belgium Oct 16, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
AI isn’t just another tool. It changes how we work, how we think, how we organise ourselves.Yet most organisations still approach it like a digital upgrade, deploying assistants, automating workflows, testing use cases inisolation.The results are predictable. Short-term wins. Long-term confusion.Effort spent. Value unclear.Many companies can’t connect AI to their actual strategic goals,and the promised ROI never materialises.At the same time, something deeper is shifting.AI can now reason, decide, adapt. Not just mimic processes butcontribute to them.The technology is evolving, but the way we implement it hasn’tcaught up.If your AI still fits inside a single department, you’re likely solvingthe wrong problem.If it works only for individuals, you're missing how your teamsactually deliver value.If it replaces people instead of supporting them, you're buildingfor today, not tomorrow.The next step isn’t more AI. It’s the right AI.Built for your business, your teams, your way of working.Not a tool to add but a structure to build around.Are we ready to treat AI as a shared capability, not a scatteredexperiment?Can we move beyond individual efficiency and build systems thatcollaborate, learn and adapt with us?Those are the questions we’ll explore at the round table.
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Germany Oct 28, 2025 Country Members Physical german
Am 28. Oktober lädt CIONET CIOs und Digital Leaders nach Köln ein: hier stellen wir reale Anwendungsfälle vor, in denen KI-Agenten Aufgaben autonom übernehmen, Prozesse beschleunigen und Entscheidungen vorbereiten – mit messbarem Nutzen für das Business.
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France Nov 4, 2025 Country Members Physical french
À l’ère des mutations géopolitiques et réglementaires, l’établissement d’une souveraineté numérique est devenu un élément stratégique essentiel pour les entreprises. Ce dialogue stratégique mettra en lumière le rôle fondamental du réseau dans la mise en place du contrôle, de la confiance et de la résilience. Nous explorerons comment une infrastructure moderne et résiliente permet d’appliquer des politiques de gestion des données et d’assurer la continuité opérationnelle. Ce dialogue stratégique, réservé à un groupe restreint de pairs, est conçu pour permettre aux leaders du numérique d’échanger sur l’un des enjeux les plus urgents aujourd’hui. Nous discuterons des réseaux « sovereign-ready » et débattrons des préoccupations croissantes autour de la souveraineté des données, qui motivent l’adoption de politiques de confidentialité et de protection des données de plus en plus strictes à l’échelle mondiale.
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Netherlands Nov 10, 2025 Public Physical english
CIONET Nederland vertrekt met een groep Nederlandse CIO's en digital leaders 10 t/m 12 november 2025 voor de geheel verzorgde CIO Innovation Trip naar de Web Summit in Lissabon, Portugal. Reis jij mee of neem je collega(s) mee!
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Bridgestone EMIA is the regional Strategic Business Unit of Bridgestone Corporation, a global leader in tires and rubber. When its high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure began to reach capacity during periods of peak usage, the company began looking into the potential of Microsoft Azure for HPC as a supplemental resource.
Virtual tire development itself is meant to enhance the product design process in terms of sustainability, efficiency, and flexibility. And coupling virtual development with Azure high-performance computing could be the perfect way to further enhance those benefits.Wolfgang De Salvador: R&D Coordinator for R&D Virtualization - Bridgestone EMIA
Bridgestone Europe, Russia, Middle East, India, and Africa (Bridgestone EMIA) is the regional Strategic Business Unit of Bridgestone Corporation, a global leader in tires and rubber, building on its expertise to provide solutions for safe and sustainable mobility.
Headquartered in Zaventem, Belgium, Bridgestone EMIA employs more than 20,000 people and conducts business in 40 countries across the region.
Bridgestone EMIA operates 15 tire plants, a major R&D center, and a proving ground, and it serves customers in an extensive retail network with thousands of touchpoints.
Each year, Bridgestone Corporation spends €780 million (over USD912 million) globally on research and development. As a key element of Bridgestone’s overall strategy, Bridgestone EMIA R&D is pursuing a digital transformation of its entire R&D operation by virtualizing its main processes. This entails intense use of simulations and data-driven, predictive models for virtual tire development, which can be very computationally intensive.
Bridgestone’s virtual tire development technology allows the company to design a digital tire, test it virtually, and fine-tune it before manufacturing prototypes or beginning physical testing. This allows Bridgestone to avoid creating approximately 200 prototype tires for each project, leading to a nearly 60 percent reduction in CO2 emissions and raw material requirements. For these purposes, access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources capable of running both implicit and explicit simulations is crucial.
Traditionally, Bridgestone has kept these resources on-premises, but this status quo might be about to change. The company’s Digital Engineering department, which is responsible for granting access to HPC resources, has begun testing the benefits of HPC in the cloud. “Virtual tire development itself is meant to enhance the product design process in terms of sustainability, efficiency, and flexibility,” says Wolfgang De Salvador, R&D Coordinator for R&D Virtualization at Bridgestone EMIA. “And coupling virtual development with Azure high-performance computing could be the perfect way to further enhance those benefits.”
The issues that the Digital Engineering department wants to solve are common. An on-premises HPC infrastructure requires sizeable upfront investment. This investment is an estimate of the company’s overall HPC needs, but as product design deadlines draw near, R&D usage spikes. If this usage exceeds the company’s HPC capacity, the result is a backlog of business-critical simulations. “We’re wary of the potential for product delays,” continues De Salvador, “and we don’t want to feel locked into a set maximum computing capacity. That’s why we’ve begun exploring the benefits of Microsoft Azure and how we might progressively hybridize our infrastructure and move operations into the cloud.”
If De Salvador’s reasons for exploring the benefits of HPC in the cloud sound familiar, it’s because they mirror the reasons most companies consider moving their on-premises infrastructures to the cloud. The difference, notes Luigi Lobello, IT Digital Innovation Leader at Bridgestone EMIA, is how “HPC multiplies the key drivers responsible for a move to the cloud.”
By progressively moving HPC workloads to Azure, especially during periods of high demand, Bridgestone EMIA is aiming to create a step-by-step cloud adoption strategy that marries the performance and scalability of the cloud with an increased return on investment for its existing on-premises infrastructure. “We want to preserve business continuity while progressively embracing the cloud,” adds Paolo Filetti, Head of Digital Engineering at Bridgestone EMIA. “When the scalability of the cloud is required, we want employees to be able to switch over to that hardware with as little disruption as possible.”
While researching the options available to them, the Bridgestone EMIA team noted the strong development and support of HPC solutions at Microsoft. The team initiated a proof of concept (POC) with the hope of meeting multiple criteria. During peak usage hours, Azure for HPC resources would need to be provisioned on demand. These resources would also need to be automatically decommissioned as demand returned to normal. Additionally, these transitions would need to be highly secure by design and completed transparently for any users. “We expected a performance hit when running HPC workloads in the cloud,” says De Salvador. “We would have been satisfied if the POC had a less than 20 percent performance reduction, but our results in Azure were far better than that. They matched performance of our on-premises infrastructure.”
To achieve these results, Bridgestone EMIA tested a number of different Azure virtual machines (VMs) and VM configurations. “For some simulations in which we benefit from having a large number of cores on a single VM, Azure machines like the HBv3-series work well for us,” says De Salvador. “And if the needs of a researcher who’s running simulations on a single machine change, we can quickly and easily switch to an array of high-throughput, low-latency VMs running InfiniBand.”
As Bridgestone EMIA kicked off its HPC on Azure POC, H-series VMs quickly came into focus based on their ability to use InfiniBand. Ultimately, 90 percent of the simulations that the company ran during the POC used the technology, with the other 10 percent being conducted on individual H-series machines. After a minimal amount of initial setup, the POC proceeded at a rapid pace. Immediately, the POC team noted how the addition of Azure VMs improved their ability to adjust the dimensions of a given simulation on the fly. No longer would a fixed number of cores need to be pre-provisioned for each simulation. Instead, each simulation’s computational needs could dictate its hardware allocation.
“What was really impressive to me was how minimal the configuration burden was, regarding out-of-the-box HPC on Azure,” says De Salvador. “With only a few adjustments to the operating system configuration files, we’ve been able to move our simulations to InfiniBand interconnected VMs in Azure. In the same way, developing our ad-hoc scheduler bursting integration has been straightforward because our HPC expertise was easily translatable to Azure services.”
As the planning stages of a potential HPC migration to Azure progress, Bridgestone EMIA has also begun examining the benefits of Azure CycleCloud. “The autoscaling capabilities of Azure CycleCloud are going to be very useful as our blending of on-premises and cloud infrastructure changes over time,” says De Salvador. “Many commercial and open-source schedulers, including those we use, are available out of the box with Azure CycleCloud. That openness of design has made our cloud migration plans very simple.”
Bart Kerkhofs, Vice President of IT for Bridgestone EMIA, sees the addition of Azure for HPC VMs to his department’s options as a step toward something fundamentally new. “From an IT perspective, our goal in adopting Azure for HPC and other new technologies is to create a digital playground,” says Kerkhofs. “That digital playground will be at once scalable, agile, highly secure, and sustainable—and in that ecosystem, Bridgestone employees will be able to freely and easily collaborate on and co-create our best new ideas.”
Put together, the results of Bridgestone’s POC point toward a potent future state for the company. “The main benefit of HPC on Azure is how seamlessly you can put out-of-the-box VMs into service to supplement on-premises infrastructure,” says De Salvador. “The same can be said about running Linux for HPC applications on Azure using CycleCloud and how well the available Linux images support HPC technologies like InfiniBand on Azure. It’s almost as if we have infinitely scalable on-premises infrastructure, but without the traditional costs and maintenance responsibilities.”
By removing the potential for backlog in the R&D process and increasing the company’s overall computing capacity on demand, the Digital Engineering department can guarantee a high level of service to its in-house customers and maintain the company’s competitive edge. Bridgestone also sees Azure as a way to reduce its reliance on a persistent cycle of on-premises hardware refreshes further down the line. “We can have constant access to the latest and newest hardware,” says De Salvador. “Each time we move a simulation to the cloud, we have the opportunity to opt for the newest, most powerful VMs available—the benefits of which can be transferred downstream to our customers through reduced time to market.”
Bridgestone’s existing HPC infrastructure also benefits in terms of sustainability, as does the potential agility of the company as a whole. Resources can quickly and transparently be provisioned in the cloud when the R&D department needs them, and they can be decommissioned when they’re no longer required, reducing operating costs. This on-demand usage allows Bridgestone EMIA to maximize overall resource usage through sharing, which helps minimize the environmental impact of R&D operations.
“We’re by definition a multicloud environment at Bridgestone,” says Kerkhofs. “In practice, however, our collaboration with Microsoft has often led to the co-creation of fantastic solutions like the one we’re developing for our HPC workloads. That kind of close relationship is part of why, within our regular cycle of on-premises hardware replacement, we’re exploring how to migrate more workloads to Azure.”
Find out more about Bridgestone EMIA on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
Our collaboration with Microsoft has often led to the co-creation of fantastic solutions like the one we’re developing for our HPC workloads. That kind of close relationship is part of why, within our regular cycle of on-premises hardware replacement, we’re exploring how to migrate more workloads to Azure.Bart Kerkhofs: Vice President of IT - Bridgestone EMIA
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CIOFEST 2025 - From Order Taker to Proactive Disruptor
Geopolitical tensions have dominated the headlines for over two years now. In this context, the cyber threat landscape is also evolving rapidly. The protection and security of critical infrastructure – both physical and digital – is becoming increasingly important.
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