.jpg)
Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
Belgium Oct 21, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
In today's competitive landscape, customer expectations have never been higher. They demand a personalised, seamless experience at every touchpoint, from initial marketing contact to post-sale service. Unified data is at the heart of creating engaging customer experiences and is meant to fuel the 360 profile. However, for many organizations, a complete picture of the customer is fragmented, with critical data scattered in disconnected systems and departments. This exclusive roundtable will bring together Digital Leaders active in multiple industries to discuss a critical challenge: breaking down data silos to build a true 360° view of the customer. We will explore how to solve the complex integration challenges that prevent a unified view, and how to transform disparate data into a single source of truth. Join us to: Discover how to overcome the technical hurdles of integrating critical business systems, such as ERP and CRM platforms, to unify customer data. Explore real-world case studies on how organisations have successfully created unified customer insights to enhance personalisation and boost commercial and operational efficiency. Discuss best practices for turning fragmented data into actionable insights that can anticipate customer needs, drive revenue growth, and foster long-term loyalty. This is a unique opportunity for Digital Leaders who are ready to transform their customer engagement strategy and unlock the full potential of their data.
Read More
Spain Oct 22, 2025 Country Members Physical spanish
Descubre cómo las organizaciones están utilizando la tecnología para impactar en el negocio a través de casos reales de uso y aprendizajes clave en áreas como ciberseguridad, automatización o data, contados por los protagonistas. Un espacio diseñado para inspirarte, conectar con expertos y potenciar la innovación en tu organización.
Read More.jpg)
Belgium Oct 22, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
Enterprises are questioning whether private networks and stacked firewalls are still worthwhile investments. A newer approach operates on the open internet with Zero Trust, eliminates perimeter complexity, and reframes cybersecurity as a business performance metric for boards and audit committees. This is a closed-door, peer discussion, not a lecture. We’ll examine the promise and its pitfalls: Are the promised savings significant, or are they too good to be true? What risks do you introduce? How does this collide with your installed base, legacy OT, entrenched processes and team competencies, and how do you overcome that without breaking operations or credibility with the board? Two senior leaders from global companies will spark the dialogue with lived experience: Kurt De Ruwe, CIO AkzoNobel Frank Bolata, CIO Syensqo
Read More
Poland Oct 23, 2025 Invitation Only Physical Polish
Cloud UP! ’25 to miejsce spotkań managerów, którzy chcą świadomie i skutecznie rozwijać swoje organizacje, wykorzystując najnowsze technologie. Nieformalnym hasłem tegorocznej edycji jest “Chmura gotowa na AI” - będziemy rozmawiać o tym, co sztuczna inteligencja naprawdę potrafi oraz pokazywać, jak wdrażać ją w praktyce. Wspólnie z ekspertami przeanalizujemy, jakie warunki muszą zostać spełnione, aby wdrożenia AI były zarówno skuteczne, jak i bezpieczne. Zerkniemy za kulisy najnowszych rodzimych produktów AI-owych, by zobaczyć ich możliwości, a także poznamy najciekawsze wdrożenia z wykorzystaniem Agentspace. Po raz kolejny spotkamy się w formule Share.Explore.Execute. Stawiamy na wymianę wiedzy i doświadczeń zdobytych podczas realizacji projektów. To one stanowią punkt wyjścia do odkrywania, testowania i skutecznej implementacji najlepszych rozwiązań w organizacjach. Cloud UP! ’25 to cztery ścieżki tematyczne, na które złożą się prezentacje, rozmowy, sesje live-demo oraz pogłębione dyskusje w formule roundtables: AI: Beyond the Hype Data Mastery Resilience & Regulatory Advanced Practitioners Dołącz do liderów chmurowych innowacji w Polsce i spotkaj się z nami już 23 października w Event Hall w Fabryce Norblina.
Read More.jpg)
Belgium Oct 23, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
How to lead responsibly when technology can deceive better than a human? AI’s ability to shape our perceptions and create new realities is becoming increasingly sophisticated. While it opens significant opportunities, it also carries risks. What happens when AI goes beyond data and algorithms to influence - or even deceive - our senses? How does this change not only our understanding of reality but also the foundations of trust, creativity, and truth in business? AI isn’t just transforming business, it is altering how we experience and interpret everything around us. From AI-generated deepfakes to personalised experiences designed to influence behaviour, the line between truth and illusion is increasingly blurred. This event combines a roundtable discussion among peers with a hands-on sensory workshop, where you will experience illusions through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Through these experiments, we will confront the ethical dilemmas that arise when AI has the power to fabricate realities and influence decisions.
Read More
Germany Oct 23, 2025 Country Members Physical german
Längst ist klar: Die KI-Transformation im Unternehmen beginnt mit der richtigen Dateninfrastruktur. Auf dem Weg zu einer “Enterprise AI-Engine”, in der Unternehmen KI für die eigenen Daten effizient nutzbar machen, müssen bewährte Fundamentals jedoch nicht gleich über Bord geworfen werden. Der CIO im Zentrum eines strategischen Transformationsprozesses sollte vor allem die richtige Balance zwischen Bestand und Innovation finden. Die zentrale Frage lautet daher: Wie lassen sich modernste KI-Technologien in hybriden Umgebungen nutzen, wenn viele Daten noch in gewachsener Infrastruktur liegen? Genau diese Fragestellung – und die nachfolgenden Diskussionspunkte – greifen wir am 23. Oktober im Rahmen eines exklusiven CIDO Roundtables auf.
Read More
Liantis scales out HR affairs applications using Azure Spring Apps
As a provider of HR tools for entrepreneurs, Liantis operates an expanding network of branch offices across Belgium. Liantis turned to Azure in a digital transformation that will ultimately affect hundreds of Java apps. Azure not only helps lower the total cost of ownership for Liantis but also helps IT teams deliver new features to market faster.unpredictable loads.
Azure Spring Apps was a strategic fit for Liantis because we can really focus on building the application, whereas Microsoft provides and secures the application platform. That’s why Azure Spring Apps is a great fit.Kurt Roggen: Infrastructure and Security Architect - Liantis
For almost 100 years, Liantis has offered support to anyone who owns an enterprise and employs people. Headquartered in Bruges, Belgium, Liantis provides the HR systems that self-employed entrepreneurs and employers use for everything from recruitment to retirement. Three companies—and their IT management systems—merged to form Liantis in 2018, which supports payroll, benefits, insurance, and many more for its clients. More than 100 software developers and other teams update apps frequently in response to ever-changing government regulations, pension guidance, and tax laws.
“As Liantis has gone through a digital transformation, more and more of our portfolio features digital products delivered through our flagship portal, My Liantis,” notes Kurt Roggen, Liantis Infrastructure and Security Architect.
A few years ago, the company upgraded its IT platforms on-premises to meet the growing customer demand. The move helped the company stay flexible even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when so many Liantis customers needed help all at once. However, the company’s on-premises datacenter began to meet its capacity limits during peak usage, such as end-of-month payroll time and during annual accounting submissions.
“Infrastructure shouldn’t be a bottleneck,” Roggen observes. “Liantis has a cloud-first strategy.” That means during the creation of the business case, we compare the benefits of on-premises, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). “We apply these cloud models to unburden our IT teams, meaning they don't need to worry about all the infrastructure. We want to go for the PaaS or SaaS solution rather than traditional virtual machines and IaaS.”
Roggen calls Liantis IT a “software factory” where the development teams are focused on delivering great digital experiences and value to customers. But the developers were building new products and apps faster than the on-premises infrastructure could support them. It was time for a new approach.
“We wanted to spend less time keeping base infrastructure, including virtual machines and containers, in the air,” Roggen recalls, “and more time delivering and adding value for our customers.”
The flagship My Liantis portal provides access to the Liantis portfolio.
With hundreds of Java services at stake, Liantis began a careful evaluation process. Every solution had to meet the company’s high standards for security, manageability, cost, and performance. IT teams use the popular Java Spring Framework with the Spring Boot technology to simplify the development of microservices-based applications, so Liantis looked at several Azure options, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Red Hat OpenShift.
“We tend to always start from the right in our evaluation process—meaning the right side of the as-a-service spectrum where we have SaaS,” Roggen explains. “The more we can delegate to someone who makes infrastructure and platform services its core business, the better. That's how we look at things.”
Around this time, Microsoft announced a partnership with VMware to create Azure Spring Apps, a platform that makes it simpler to deploy and operate Spring Cloud applications. The platform abstracts away the complexity of managing infrastructure and Spring Cloud middleware.
After thoroughly evaluating security, manageability, cost, performance, and other key criteria across the various services, Liantis chose Azure Spring Apps.
“Azure Spring Apps was a strategic fit for Liantis because we can really focus on building the application, whereas Microsoft provides and secures the application platform. That’s why Azure Spring Apps is a great fit,” Roggen concludes.
Liantis was an early adopter of Azure Spring Apps and provided input to the Microsoft product team during the service’s preview period. According to Roggen, the transition was very straightforward. The Java developers can focus on building their business logic while Azure takes care of dynamic scaling, security patches, compliance standards, and high availability.
We believe Azure Spring Apps will help us deliver value faster for our customers and lower our total cost of ownership.Nicolas Van Kerschaver: Chief Information Officer - Liantis
For the past few years, Liantis has approached application development using event-driven and microservices-based architectures. “Our huge, monolithic HR payroll engine is being sliced into many, many microservices. And this is where Azure Spring Apps also fits in,” Roggen explains. Azure Spring Apps is at the center of an architectural approach that Liantis can stamp out consistently for all its workloads.
Most of the Liantis applications consist of multiple Spring Boot services plus an Angular front end. They require both synchronous and asynchronous connectivity to services and legacy systems on-premises, and the architecture is representative of other Liantis apps.
Liantis exposes its web apps through the flagship My Liantis portal. Customers have secure access through an easy, single sign-on experience provided by Spring integration with the ForgeRock identity provider and Azure Active Directory. “It was key that we were able to integrate with ForgeRock for our business applications and customer-facing applications,” Roggen reports. “In the end, it was a straightforward integration with Azure Spring Apps.”
Customer requests are sent through Azure Application Gateway, a web traffic load balancer and web application firewall, which routes requests to the back-end Spring Boot services running in Azure Spring Apps.
For access to services and systems on-premises, Liantis takes advantage of the virtual network (VNet) injection feature in Azure Spring Apps. Apps and the service runtime on the Liantis network are isolated from the internet, but VNet injection enables them to interact with systems on-premises and with Azure services in other virtual networks.
“VNet integration was one of our crucial security decisions—to only expose services through another mechanism,” Roggen explains. “In our case, it’s Azure Application Gateway, which exposes the services sitting behind it.”
A hub-spoke virtual network topology also helps add security through workload segmentation. The hub virtual network acts as the central point of connectivity for the spoke virtual networks, where the apps run. Low-latency virtual network peering connects the spokes to the hub. For added security, Liantis also enabled private endpoints for Azure services, which use a private IP address for the network interface.
Structured data associated with the apps is stored in Azure SQL Database, the highly scalable service that has become a Liantis standard. Because it’s only exposed through private endpoints, Roggen says it matches the VNet integration strategy and enables the applications to talk to the back-end databases securely without the public exposure typically associated with PaaS.
Azure Key Vault safeguards keys, passwords, and other secrets used for authentication, allowing secrets to be injected directly into applications through Spring. “Compared to our previous platform, management of secrets and keys is so much easier with Azure Key Vault,” Roggen reports.
External and internal communications are secured using TLS/SSL. “We were very happy to see that Azure Spring Apps—in a very simple, straightforward way—allows us to secure communications end to end, from the applications over the gateway servers, using Key Vault to insert certificates,” he adds.
Automation and end-to-end monitoring are also essential for the company. “It was crucial for Liantis to have hybrid monitoring across on-premises and cloud-based Spring Boot microservices,” Roggen explains. The Liantis team combines Dynatrace observability tools with Azure Monitor and Log Analytics for complete application health metrics. During testing, Liantis developers lean heavily on the log streaming feature, which sends real-time application console logs for troubleshooting. “Now we have a very simple onboarding process for new applications with Azure, Azure Spring Apps, and Dynatrace monitoring.”
Liantis can clone this architecture blueprint for most of its workloads. Spring Boot services run in Azure Spring Apps. Azure SQL Database supports the data layer. Private endpoints help secure service dependencies, while CI/CD and monitoring tools automate end to end.
As Java and Angular fans, the Liantis developers continue to work with their chosen developer tools, such as IntelliJ IDEA. Azure Spring Apps supports popular integrated development environments (IDEs) and frameworks, plus tools for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
At the beginning of the project, Liantis was using Maven as a build tool, Bitbucket for version control, and Jenkins to run the CI/CD jobs. As part of its DevSecOps journey, the company looked for a DevOps platform. An investment in HashiCorp Terraform and GitHub paved the way for infrastructure as code (IaC).
“In our search for a DevOps platform, we took a different approach. We believe that there’s enormous value in the existing integrations of a platform like GitHub,” Roggen explains.
The move to IaC is helping the team speed apps into production. “Whether it’s the development, test, acceptance, or production environment, everything has to be deployed and managed through Terraform and IaC to stay consistent and avoid configuration drift,” he notes.
The team is also starting to provision the infrastructure for new deployments through GitHub Enterprise and GitHub Actions. Azure Spring Apps provides an action workflow for GitHub Actions to automate app deployments.
“We are in a transition phase,” Roggen points out. “GitHub Actions is key to engineering and development for automation. We get end-to-end visibility into our apps, systems, and end user experiences so we can detect challenges as they arise."
Azure Spring Apps lowers the investment to onboard our many developers. We'd rather have them do what they love to do—develop—and worry less about operational activities.Kurt Roggen: Infrastructure and Security Architect - Liantis
According to Roggen, Azure Spring Apps is helping Liantis deliver on its vision, and the migration of these applications is just the beginning. “It’s the first of many to follow,” he predicts. “For Liantis, this project has become a kind of development pattern that we reuse for many new developments, or use when we’re refactoring an existing app. It's become our standard.”
In moving to Azure Spring Apps, the company assesses the total cost of ownership by considering the expense of infrastructure maintenance on top of the cost of onboarding developers to a new platform. That’s harder to assess, but Liantis engineers are shifting to a cloud mindset as they become accustomed to allowing Azure to handle the infrastructure.
Roggen reports, “Now they have more time to focus on other interesting tasks that sometimes fall into the background when it gets busy, such as researching security and other innovative technology topics.”
For a company looking to scale with ease, the strategy fits.
For Liantis, this project has become a kind of development pattern that we reuse for many new developments, or use when we’re refactoring an existing app. It has become our standard.Kurt Roggen: Infrastructure and Security Architect - Liantis
Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
.png)
Isabelle Droll - CIO for Airline, Corporate, Hotels & Resorts and Sustainability at TUI - Data, Diversity, and Destinations
.png)
Sharon Prior - CIO in transition - How Great Tech Leadership Begins with Business Thinking
-1.jpg)
José Antonio López, Group CIO at TOUS - Jewels, Data & AI: Inside the Digital Transformation of TOUS
.png)
Tom Tanghe - General Manager ITC EMEA at Daikin Europe - Reinventing the CIO Role
.jpg)
CIOFEST 2025 - From Order Taker to Proactive Disruptor
The role of the CIO has evolved from managing systems to shaping outcomes: growth, resilience, and competitive edge are now won or lost in the technology arena. Today ’ s CIOs must balance stability with innovation, control costs while attracting scarce talent, and modernise legacy infrastructure while adopting emerging technologies.
As AI transitions from a specialised tool to an all-pervasive force, understanding its profound implications for our human lives is no longer merely academic but an urgent imperative for social well-being and strategic preparedness.
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.
.png?width=600&height=600&name=Anna%20Kopp%20(1).png)
