Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
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Germany Sep 9, 2025 Country Members Physical german
Vom ersten Use Case zur strategischen Neuausrichtung CIONET lädt bereits zum vierten Mal zu einem exklusiven Roundtable für CIOs und Digitalverantwortliche aus Logistik und Handel ein. Im Mittelpunkt des Abends steht die Frage, wie Unternehmen ihre KI-Initiativen erfolgreich skalieren und aus ersten Use Cases echten strategischen Mehrwert schaffen. Microsoft 365 für Frontline Worker: Moderne Tools, die Mitarbeitende im Tagesgeschäft entlasten ServiceNow für Prozessintegration: Automatisierte End-to-End-Workflows – vom Schadensfall bis zur Retourenabwicklung KI-gestützte Disposition und Planung: Mit smarten Algorithmen zur optimierten Supply Chain Digitale Lieferketten und letzte Meile: Transparenz, Effizienz und Kundenzentrierung durchgängig gedacht
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Belgium Sep 13, 2025 All Members Physical english
Join us for a wonderful ride. The ride is accessible to all levels of riders and doesn't require extensive technical skills. More information will follow soon. Looking forward to ride together!
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Germany Sep 17, 2025 Country Members Physical german
Cybersecurity ist längst kein reines IT-Thema mehr – sie betrifft das gesamte Unternehmen. Doch während die Bedrohungslage zunimmt, geraten viele Security-Verantwortliche an ihre Belastungsgrenzen: zwischen 24/7-Verantwortung, wachsenden Anforderungen und dem ständigen Innovationsdruck.
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Germany Sep 17, 2025 Country Members Physical german
IT-Betrieb und Cybersicherheit stehen heute unter extremem Druck: steigende Komplexität, wachsende regulatorische Anforderungen (NIS2, DORA, KRITIS), chronische Ressourcenknappheit – und gleichzeitig eine Bedrohungslage, die keine Verzögerungen duldet. Trotzdem agieren viele IT- und Security-Teams noch immer in Silos. Die Folge: ineffiziente Abläufe, Tool-Wildwuchs, langsame Reaktion auf Vorfälle und unklare Verantwortlichkeiten.
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Germany Sep 18, 2025 Country Members Virtual german
Nachhaltigkeit ist für CIOs nicht nur ein „Nice-to-have“, sondern eine strategische Priorität – sie beeinflusst direkt die finanzielle Performance, die operative Effizienz und die langfristige Wettbewerbsfähigkeit.
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Belgium Sep 18, 2025 Country Members Physical french
La dette technique est comparable à la négligence des réparations d'une maison. Ignorer un toit qui fuit peut faire gagner du temps aujourd'hui, mais cela pourrait conduire à l'effondrement du plafond plus tard. Pour remédier à la dette technique, il faut trouver et réparer ces fuites dès maintenant et mettre en place un plan d'entretien de la maison afin qu'elle soit prête pour les extensions futures. Pour résoudre ces problèmes, il faut définir des priorités stratégiques, communiquer clairement avec les parties prenantes et établir une feuille de route à long terme pour la modernisation. Cet événement se déroulera entièrement en français.
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When billions of mission-critical file transfers depend on you
How ExaVault maximizes uptime using IBM Instana Observability
“We’re mission-critical for a lot of companies,” explains David Ordal, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at ExaVault Inc., whose solutions facilitate two billion file transfers per year for customers such as Disney, Adobe, Xerox and Zillow.
The majority of ExaVault customers are performing automated, system-to-system file transfers, like moving data from a point-of-sale system to an analytics platform or an inventory management system. ExaVault’s API handles an average of 35,000 requests per minute and over 50 million calls daily. While the file transfers are automated, parties on both sides of the transfer rely on these automations to make business decisions.
If we go down, our customers start losing money,” Ordal says.
The stakes are high for individual ExaVault customers, and they each use ExaVault in a slightly different way, often creating custom functionality through the developer API. ExaVault’s entire customer base isn’t affected by all issues—in fact, often only a single customer experiences a slowdown. But if that happens, ExaVault’s team needs to be able to see what the customer is experiencing and debug the problem.
Before moving to the IBM Instana® Observability solution, ExaVault was using a monitoring system that made getting granular, customer-specific information nearly impossible. “We couldn’t tag transactions with their user ID, and then filter down into the specific customer issue,” explains Tom Fite, Senior Backend Engineer at ExaVault. Specific customer issues can be completely lost in averages—if a single customer is experiencing a slowdown, it won’t show up at all on a monitoring system that only gives a holistic view.
ExaVault achieved a 56.6% MTTR reduction
And it reached 99.99% availability
Our team is able to dedicate more time towards new features and roadmap planning, instead of smashing bugs all day. ”
When ExaVault started looking for a new monitoring solution, the top priority was the ability to break down metrics by account and see what “edge case” customers were experiencing. Other top criteria were cost and user interface, both of which had been pain points with previous vendors.
“Some APM vendors are prohibitively expensive,” explains Fite. “Especially when you are talking about scaling your application and you have your monitoring running on more than a few boxes.”
ExaVault considered factors like stack traces, database calls, throughput, data retention policies and infrastructure monitoring. But a graphical user interface that makes sense to non-technical users was also a key reason to choose Instana.
“I’m a sucker for a good user interface,” Fite says. “But it can also help me explain to other people on our team, especially people who are less technically savvy than me, that we have fixed an issue.”
ExaVault uses Instana to monitor API performance and for error tracking, debugging and alerting. The most important metric ExaVault looks at on a day-to-day basis is latency. “We need to make sure every customer is having a good experience,” Fite says. “If a customer is waiting more than a couple seconds, they might leave.”
With Instana, though, Fite doesn’t have to look at the dashboard all day. Instead, Instana sends an alert to a dedicated Slack channel if anything is out of the ordinary.
When it comes to account-level monitoring, ExaVault uses the Instana software development kit (SDK) to assign metadata to each API call as it comes in. As a result, Fite can filter on a huge number of variables. The most common use case, though, is filtering by account or even by individual users in an account. “If a user is having a problem that we don’t see at the high level, we can drill down and really troubleshoot just looking at their information,” Fite says.
Since ExaVault started using Instana, the mean time to repair (MTTR) for customer-impacting bugs has dropped by 56.6%. In addition, the platform’s slowdowns and downtime have decreased substantially. It was at 99.51% uptime before, and it’s now at 99.99% . “We’re accomplishing the goal that we set out to do,” Fite explains. “The reason we were able to do that is we had better visibility into our problems.”
In some cases, there were bugs ExaVault didn’t even know existed before using Instana. Within days of getting set up with Instana, ExaVault realized there was a bug in the software that was querying the memory cache too frequently and wasn’t saving correctly. Fixing the previously invisible bug immediately reduced the load on application servers.
“Our tech debt has decreased because we’re able to get through stuff a lot faster,” says Eddie Castillo, ExaVault’s Head of Marketing. “Our team is able to dedicate more time towards new features and roadmap planning, instead of smashing bugs all day.”
There are a few major projects on the horizon. Without the robust internal testing possible with Instana, Fite would be a lot more worried about the potential for bugs to slip as they deploy improvements to the API. “Instana is going to help us ensure that the changes work better than the current version,” Fite says.
ExaVault is also working on moving from a homegrown container orchestration system to Kubernetes. Lastly, ExaVault is excited to start using Instana’s deployment tracking to compare performance metrics before and after deployments in the future.
“With the upcoming roadmap, if we didn’t have these tools, it would be impossible to keep an eye on our tech stack,” Castillo says. “Tom used to have a million terminal windows open on his desktop. But having these tools in place, it gives us visibility as we diversify and add more complexity to our overall architecture."
ExaVault (link resides outside of ibm.com) provides FTP and file sharing solutions for businesses of all sizes in more than 100 countries. Its solution enhances traditional FTP/SFTP with a modern interface and enables secure collaboration and sharing across platforms and time zones. ExaVault was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in San Ramon, California.
Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
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Sharon Prior - CIO in transition - How Great Tech Leadership Begins with Business Thinking
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José Antonio López, Group CIO at TOUS - Jewels, Data & AI: Inside the Digital Transformation of TOUS
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Tom Tanghe - General Manager ITC EMEA at Daikin Europe - Reinventing the CIO Role
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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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