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CIONET - What's next

Connecting ambitious digital leaders and businesses around the globe.

Catch up on the upcoming CIONET Events

             
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Germany Oct 20, 2025 Country Members Virtual german

Online: AI & DATA Knowledge Transfer - Briefing 20

Die Realisierung des Potenzials von KI und datengesteuerten Strategien stellt nicht länger nur einen Wettbewerbsvorteil dar, sondern ist Heute auch entscheidend für den langfristigen Erfolg eines jeden Unternehmens. Unsere Wissensaustausch-Briefings "AI & Data Knowledge Transfer" zielen darauf ab, CIDOs und Senior Digital Leaders praktische Anwendungen aufzuzeigen und umsetzbaren Erkenntnissen von Fachexperten zu vermitteln, die den Weg für die transformative digitale Reise ebnen und beschleunigen.

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Belgium Oct 21, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

CIONET Round Table - From Disconnected Data to Unified Insight ; Building a 360° customer view to unlock commercial growth

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.

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Spain Oct 22, 2025 Country Members Physical spanish

Barcelona TECH Quest 2025

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.

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Belgium Oct 22, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

The End of the Firewall

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    

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Poland Oct 23, 2025 Invitation Only Physical Polish

CLOUD UP'25

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. 

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Belgium Oct 23, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

AI: The Great Illusionist

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.

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Recent Cases

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Etat du Valais cuts time for digital services provision in 3

To cope with the pressure of more frequent releases, the ITOps shifted to a container approach, starting with Docker and eventually transitioning to Red Hat® OpenShift®. Discovering the Red Hat build of Quarkus and then adopting it has allowed developers to focus on delivering business value, increase test speeds, and cut development time by a 3rd.

The cantonal administration Etat du Valais serves the 345,000 inhabitants of the canton of
Valais in southwestern Switzerland. As digitization climbed its agenda, IT wanted to deliver more
value to the business faster. When more frequent releases put pressure on the IT operations
team, developers switched to a container approach, initially with Docker and later with Red Hat
OpenShift. Discovering the Red Hat build of Quarkus at the Red Hat Summit and subsequently
adopting it has allowed developers to focus on delivering business value and test faster,
cutting development to one 3rd. 

 

Delivering advanced digital services for the citizens of Valais
Situated in southwestern Switzerland, the Valais is one of the 26 cantons forming the Swiss
Confederation. Its population of around 350,000 inhabitants lives across 67 square kilometers
of land, which includes Monte Rosa and Lake Geneva. Etat du Valais, the Valais’ cantonal
administration, has around 40 business units (departments), which cover everything from
finance and energy to security, institutions, and sport.
The cantonal administration is eager to provide its citizens with modern services to meet their
needs and, at the same time, offer the best value. With digitization high on its agenda, IT wanted to
provide value to the business faster. “Our development team adopted an Agile approach and began
delivering new functionality every couple of weeks,” said Steve Favez, Web Architect and Head
of Internet Capability Center at Etat du Valais. However, the more frequent releases put a lot of
pressure on the operations team.
Moving to using containers with Docker empowered the development team to deploy its
applications to production without relying on the operations team. “We started to have more
and more applications deployed on Docker and so began thinking about orchestrating all those
applications,” said Favez. “We moved to Red Hat OpenShift to give us better security and a better
ecosystem, further improving our ability to deliver more and more value to the business.”
Favez and his small team of ten saw that Red Hat OpenShift offered more opportunities to allow
them to deliver more value to the business—and cost-efficiency. “We realized we could save
CPU and memory resources and thus reduce costs by stopping some applications,” said Favez.
“We could switch off applications that are only used for a few months of the year and switch off
our testing and quality control environments if we had nothing under development.”
Restarting an application based on Spring Boot or even the legacy J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition)
framework could take ten or even 20 seconds. This slow startup was wasting time, not only for the
operations team managing the applications but also for the development team updating them.
“When our developers came to test the new functionality they had just written, they were wasting
a lot of time waiting for their application to start running,” said Favez

 

Adopting a Kubernetes-native Java framework for containerized applications
Favez discovered the perfect solution while attending Red Hat Summit. Full of enthusiasm, on his
return, he presented the Red Hat build of Quarkus—part of Red Hat Application Foundations—to
his team. The Red Hat build of Quarkus is an open source, container-first, Kubernetes-native Java
framework that allows developers to optimize container-native applications. “The Red Hat build of
Quarkus had exactly the capabilities we needed,” said Favez. “It would give us elasticity. It would
allow us to switch applications on and off to save resources. And I wouldn’t need to teach my Java
developers a new language.”
To prove the concept, Favez wrote a small service to scan a file for viruses in just one day.
When he had previously written the service—a RESTful Web API—in Spring Boot, it took 1 week. “We’d
had some issues with the Spring Boot version,” said Favez. “It didn’t manage large files well.
But the Quarkus version worked perfectly.”
redhat.com Case study Etat du Valais cuts time for digital services provision in three 3
With the success of this first proof of concept, which went to production after 1 week, the team
started using the Red Hat build of Quarkus on larger projects. “The result was exactly the same,”
said Favez. “People developed faster. It was easy, and it worked. We now use the Red Hat build of
Quarkus for every new application we write. And we are migrating applications from legacy
frameworks to Quarkus when we have the time.”

 

Accelerating time-to-market while optimizing costs


Saved operational costs thanks to a smaller footprint
The Red Hat build of Quarkus allows developers to optimize container-native applications for peak
performance. Its small computing resource footprint ensures low memory and CPU consumption,
reducing overall costs.
“We’ve cut our application computing resource usage in three,” said Favez, “because the native mode
of Quarkus is so fast and so light.” In 1 instance, an application the team had written using Spring
Boot required 500 megabytes of memory—but just 50 megabytes with the Red Hat build of Quarkus.
In 2024, the team is planning to take advantage of Knative to become more elastic. Knative
eliminates provisioning and server management tasks, so developers can focus on building business
value. They will be able to create a service by packaging code as a container image and deploying
it on Red Hat OpenShift, and it will only run when its needed; Knative automatically starts and
stops instances. This will ensure computing resources aren’t consumed unless the code needs
to do something.
Existing Quarkus applications have been built in native mode, making them Knative-ready and easy
to deploy on the platform in the future.

 

Reduced cluster usage by 40%, making room for new workloads
With those applications having a significantly smaller footprint using the framework of Red Hat’s
build of Quarkus, operations can now run additional meaningful workloads on their existing Red Hat
OpenShift cluster. Spring Boot would require a cluster up to 40% larger than Red Hat’s build
of Quarkus.
“Quarkus has brought a big improvement to our Red Hat OpenShift cluster,” said Favez. “Operations
don’t have to add new nodes when we deploy more applications. We are deploying more and more
applications, and we are not using our entire cluster. We can continue to deliver things without having
to increase the size of our Red Hat OpenShift cluster.”

 

Increased developer productivity threefold
The fast startup times of Red Hat’s build of Quarkus’ have helped Etat du Valais significantly
reduce development time. “With Red Hat Quarkus, we’ve cut development time by three compared
to using our old J2EE server eight years ago,” said Favez. “Our developers can write their code faster,
and they can test it faster too.”
Developers no longer have to wait for their applications to restart each time they test it—they can
now code and test it straight away.
Favez also commented that developers can now focus on creating business value because
Red Hat’s build of Quarkus natively provides technical functionality. “Quarkus gives developers
the code needed to invoke a web service, for instance,” said Favez. “They can really focus on the
business functionality because they don’t have to write the low-level code.” 

 

Ensured an easy transition from Spring and J2EE for Java developers
Switching from the Spring Boot and J2EE frameworks to Red Hat’s build of Quarkus was really easy
for Etat du Valais’ developers. “Red Hat Quarkus is still Java,” said Favez. “It uses a language that my
team was already familiar with. So, it was no big deal to move from J2EE or Spring Boot to Red Hat
Quarkus. It was really easy. There is nothing new for them.”
Despite not having any previous experience with Quarkus, Favez rewrote an API that had taken a
week to write in Spring Boot in just one day. “The documentation of Quarkus is just perfect and really
easy to understand. This API was working better than the one we wrote in Spring Boot,” said Favez.
“We had it in production within a week.”

 

Expanding success to business units and partners
Etat du Valais’ central development team is so happy with the Red Hat build of Quarkus that Favez
doesn’t need to mandate that they use it, even though he has stipulated that any new application will
be written using the Quarkus framework. He is instead encouraging developers within the business
units and third-party providers to use it.
“Not every provider is using Quarkus; most are still using Spring Boot or J2EE frameworks,”
said Favez. “We are telling them, ‘please use frameworks that use less memory. Quarkus is a good
solution.’ We say that we are really gaining a lot from it, and they will gain something too if they use
it to develop applications for us.”
In its effort to do more with less, the administration plans to also adopt Red Hat Ansible®
 Automation
Platform for automatically provisioning and changing systems. “Automation with Ansible Automation
Platform will be really important for Etat du Valais,” said Favez.
With integration high on the agenda, the administration also has Red Hat AMQ Streams to its
roadmap. Red Hat AMQ streams is Red Hat’s implementation of the Apache Kafka project and, like
the Red Hat build of Quarkus, is part of Red Hat Application Foundations and includes the Apache
Camel and Camel on Quarkus integration frameworks, among other technologies for connecting
applications and data. “Red Hat has made it easy for us to install and use these important integration
tools on our Red Hat OpenShift clusters,” said Favez.
The open source solutions provided by Red Hat meet the many needs of today’s organizations: “
Red Hat really understands development and operational teams’ requirements,” said Favez.
“Doing more with less is a requirement for every team, every company. And Red Hat provides
all the tools that we need to do that, and they do it well.”

 

About Etat du Valais
The Valais cantonal administration (Etat du Valais) is 1 of the largest employers in Valais and offers
jobs in 40 different departments and in around 150 different professions. Every day, employees use
their diverse skills to help shape the high quality of life and the future of the canton. 

Checkout our CIONET COOKBOOK

cookbook

Embark on a culinary journey through the ever-evolving world of digital leadership with our third edition of the CIONET Cookbook: Recipes for Digital Success. Unveiling the intricate trilemma faced by today’s Master Chefs, our trailblazing European CIOs address a challenge at the nexus of customer interests, digital transformation strategies, and IT modernisation. Their secret? Synchronising the gearing between customer, business, and technology to create a frictionless movement through the digital landscape.

The CIONET Cookbook uses the analogy of a five-star restaurant to explain the importance of optimally integrated technology, with the CIO as Master Chef. In order to provide the best service to its customers, a top restaurant must have the right atmosphere, an inviting menu, a well-equipped kitchen, talented and committed front-of-house and kitchen staff and smooth-running processes that ensure an enjoyable experience for diners.

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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.

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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.

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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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CIONET’s mission is to help IT executives become more at ease and above all more successful in their jobs. So they can do more than just keep up with change but ultimately define it. CIONET opens up a whole new universe of opportunities in IT management.

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