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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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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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Isabelle Droll - CIO for Airline, Corporate, Hotels & Resorts and Sustainability at TUI - Data, Diversity, and Destinations
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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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