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Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge
Germany Sep 29, 2025 Country Members Virtual german
Unsere Wissensaustausch-Briefings "AI & Data Knowledge Transfer" zielen darauf ab, CIDOs und Senior Digital Leaders mit praktischen Anwendungen und umsetzbaren Erkenntnissen von Fachexperten zu vermitteln, die den Weg für transformative digitale Reisen ebnen.
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Germany Sep 30, 2025 Country Members Physical german
Von der Theorie in die Praxis: Erst Business, dann Bier.Unstrukturierte Daten sind das verborgene Kapital vieler Unternehmen – und zugleich eine der größten Herausforderungen moderner IT. Gemeinsam mit CIOs, CDOs und CTOs der CIONET-Community sprechen wir zuerst bei WeWork München über Strategien, Technologien und echte Use Cases, um dieses Potenzial zu heben. Danach geht's weiter auf die Wiesn – für den offenen Austausch in bayerischer Atmosphäre.
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UK Sep 30, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
This exclusive Jefferson dinner, hosted by Mendix and CIONET, brings together a hand-picked group of senior executives and digital leaders from across the UK financial sector.
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Netherlands Sep 30, 2025 Invitation Only Physical dutch
Alleen op uitnodiging. Mastering Digital Sovereignty Control, trust and resilience in an era of geopolitical and regulatory shifts. From the Network to the Data.
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Belgium Oct 1, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english
In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, organisations face a critical challenge: how to modernise their legacy systems while managing costs, maintaining security, and ensuring operational continuity. This exclusive round table discussion brings together CIOs, CTOs, and Digital Leaders to explore best practices for legacy and lifecycle management. Key topics include extending the lifespan of existing systems, mitigating cyber security risks, optimising costs, and integrating legacy platforms with modern technologies. We’ll also delve into sustainability, workforce challenges, and future-proofing IT infrastructures to navigate technological obsolescence.
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Germany Oct 7, 2025 Country Members Virtual german
Alle nutzen KI, aber keiner weiß wie effektiv! Im Jahr 2025 sind wir als IT-EntscheiderInnen gefordert die Wünsche der Fachbereiche an Künstliche Intelligenz zu managen. Welche KI dient als Copilot für unsere Mitarbeitenden, inwieweit hat diese Zugang zu Firmenwissen und könnten wir heute bereits sinnvoll einen KI Agenten in die IT Systemlandschaft einbinden? Unser Business Partner Scheer PAS spricht als Anbieter einer Process iPaaS Plattform mit hunderten Unternehmen jedes Jahr über IT-Integration. In dieser Online-Session besprechen wir erste Reifegradmodelle zu KI, wo der deutsche Mittelstand sich befindet und wie wir die nächste Innovationsstufe erreichen. Wir teilen praktische Erfahrungen aus dem Marktumfeld und planen unsere nächsten Schritte in der Adaption von KI.
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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.
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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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CIOFEST 2025 - From Order Taker to Proactive Disruptor
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.
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