Belgium 25-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english
As AI shapes our future, the time is now to address and correct its inherent biases. Join leading female voices in tech as we explore how to undo past mistakes, champion neutrality, and feed AI systems with inclusive, unbiased data. This conference is a call to action for female leaders in AI and tech to ensure the next generation of intelligent systems reflects fairness, diversity, and equity. Together, let’s set things right and redefine the future of AI.
Read MoreBelgium 25-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english
On 25th September, during the Red Hat Summit: Connect 2025 in Brussels, CIONET is hosting an exclusive, invitation-only round table for leading CIOs, CTOs, and digital leaders. While the Summit offers a broad programme, this CIONET session is a separate, distinct event, conducted in its own dedicated room with private catering, ensuring a focused and confidential peer-to-peer discussion. This round table will delve into why certain cloud-native techniques offer undeniable benefits, irrespective of where your applications are deployed, be it on-premise, in a hyperscale cloud, or a hybrid environment. Even outside public clouds, these modern, modular architectures consistently deliver increased agility, enhanced scalability, and quicker time-to-market. The real power behind these advantages lies in automation. When done properly, automation significantly boosts team efficiency, improves system quality, and drastically cuts risks from slow systems or downtime. However, achieving truly effective automation comes with its own set of challenges, which we'll address head-on. Key Discussion Points Include: "No-Regret" Cloud-Native Pillars: We'll try to pinpoint essential techniques every organisation should adopt, such as microservices architecture, containerisation (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), API-first design, stateless application design, and immutable infrastructure. Why are these crucial for modern applications, no matter the deployment location? Strategic Vendor Lock-in: How to judiciously manage vendor lock-in. For new innovations and applications with a relatively short life expectancy, leveraging the latest unique features of a hyperscale cloud might be beneficial. For long-lived applications (expected to be live for decades), the focus might shift to limiting exposure by utilising generally available technologies. Automation Anywhere: How can organisations effectively implement automation strategies to unlock the full potential of cloud-native initiatives across diverse infrastructures? What are the biggest hurdles, and how are leaders overcoming them? This CIONET round table offers a unique and intimate setting for digital leaders to gain critical insights, exchange perspectives, and shape the strategic path towards application modernisation that truly offers no regrets.
Read MoreBelgium 30-9-25 Squad Only Virtual english
Everyone has technical debt. The question is what to do with it. Refactor now? Wait for the next feature? Build on it and hope it holds? If you’re tired of debating whether to clean up or move on, this session helps you frame the debt conversation in a way that supports both speed and stability.
Read MoreSeptember 30, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Everyone has technical debt. The question is what to do with it. Refactor now? Wait for the next feature? Build on it and hope it holds? If you’re tired of debating whether to clean up or move on, this session helps you frame the debt conversation in a way that supports both speed and stability.
Read MoreOctober 2, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Architecture doesn’t happen in diagrams. It happens in minds, seasoned, curious, sharp minds that understand how the pieces fit. But who’s shaping these minds? Who’s growing the next generation of digital architects? If you’re responsible for complex systems, and for the people designing them, this session is for you.
Read MoreOctober 14, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Agile delivery often collides with inflexible infrastructures. One team wants to release weekly. Another is waiting six months for a new test environment. Sounds familiar? If your infra team is tired of being the bottleneck, and your devs are tired of waiting, this session opens a path forward.
Read MoreAXA Switzerland adopts agile app dev with Red Hat OpenShift
AXA Switzerland, part of one of the world’s largest insurance providers, sought to transform its IT and work approach with agile development practices and cloud computing technology. By creating a multicloud application environment with Red Hat® OpenShift®, AXA increased application deployments by 33% in just one year.
Question: What was the specific business challenge or opportunity you faced? What are your market pressure & demands?
Answer: Andreas Maier, CIO, AXA Switzerland: AXA Switzerland is one of the larger components of the AXA group and is the market leader in the insurance business in Switzerland. We started our transformation four years ago. On this challenging path we already achieved some important milestones: first and foremost an agile transformation. We completely reshaped the way we develop software together with our business, from a pure IT setup with developer teams into a completely agile setup with 78 product teams today. We integrated product teams with business and IT. We have a new culture.
Question: What are the market challenges for AXA?
Answer: AXA identified a long time back the potential of the cloud technology and decided to implement a public managed cloud strategy enabled by the Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform [GCP]. The regulatory requirements which we need to comply with lead us to a strategy of investing in partners which allow us to stay flexible and minimize the vendor lock-in effects. Red Hat is such a partner which enables us to execute our strategy in a very efficient way.
Question: Where are you on this journey today?
Answer: Today, we continue to transform toward our next milestone: data, technology and innovation excellence in our product teams. Part of this journey, Red Hat is one of the providers who supports us in renewing our technology stack. With Red Hat® OpenShift® on top of an IBM technology stack, we have in recent years migrated 100% of our decentralized application estate into partially public and mostly private cloud. Starting in 2022, we will move to public clouds in Switzerland because of regulatory requirements. We will use the Red Hat solutions there too and build on our partnership together.
Question: Why did you choose Red Hat? Why open source?
Answer: Five years ago, we started analyzing the market for existing solutions for containerization. We identified Red Hat OpenShift as a leading enterprise Kubernetes service with an open source approach. The core values of our agile transformation depend on co-creation, openness, feedback, and extreme programming principles. We chose Red Hat OpenShift because of the quality and maturity of the solution, but also the premium support and the talent behind it. Today, we leverage developer and operational centric tools for rapid application development, deployment, life cycle management and full stack support. So we’re using the full stack of Red Hat technology.
Question: How did Red Hat support you through your transformation and multicloud strategy? What benefits do you see from working with Red Hat?
Answer: Our engineers benefit from working with Red Hat OpenShift every day. The developers and operations engineers’ lives became much easier. Red Hat OpenShift enables our developers to focus on coding and innovating. They don’t have to worry about day to day work, resilience, stability, deployment, integrating or testing. That’s taken from our shoulders, so we can focus much more on solving the customer’s problems.
Question: Are there any additional advantages?
Answer: We are working more efficiently on the existing private and managed public cloud infrastructure, while the operations engineers are able to ensure a customer-oriented availability for the applications deployed in the cloud and at the same time scale up very easily the number of hosts on which an application runs.
At the same time, with Red Hat OpenShift, we are able to comply with local financial regulatory requirements and stay as flexible as possible, in order to minimize migration efforts in the event of having to change one of our public cloud vendors.
Question: Can you describe the benefits the Red Hat solution has brought to AXA Switzerland?
Answer: Among others, we now have a much faster time to market for our delivery. I’m now in a position to measure the amount of software deliverables to the business. In 2019, we delivered 33% more software to the business compared to 2018. Thanks to the developer support that we have through Red Hat, I expect that we will be able to develop software much faster than before.
Additionally we profit from a growing number of applications as well as increased employee productivity. Red Hat technology enabled us to adopt a multicloud strategy for more financial transparency and business flexibility.
Question: Have Red Hat and open source influenced your company culture and workflows?
Answer: Certainly. AXA Switzerland has a very open and inclusive culture. Based on Red Hat enterprise open source technologies and agile principles, we developed a new cultural mindset which promotes co-creation and collaboration, information exchange, full transparency and constructive feedback. Now, product teams and the business work together on customer solutions, which has tremendously increased the joint ownership feeling. Five years ago we spoke about business and IT, and now we speak about demand and delivery, customer value and cycle time. We speak a common language, which makes me very happy. This open source community culture should be embraced by the whole industry. Insurance companies need to become more open to collaboration. Containerization is a big enabler for being able to connect with partners much more than before. We believe that the power of innovation lies in co-creation, open source collaboration and continuous improvement.
Question: How important is the ability to innovate in the future?
Answer: AXA Switzerland is the number one insurer in Switzerland with a market share of 24 percent and above average growth. In terms of innovation, we’re perceived as one of the digital leaders by our customers. This is important for us to differentiate. AXA aims to transform from payer to partner: instead of only paying for damages, we want to become a partner for customers. Instead of just selling insurance services, we want to partner for prevention or back-to-business services to help our customers live a better life. That’s our vision.
Question: Does your Red Hat solution contribute to future innovation?
Answer: With our strategy we intend to achieve very ambitious goals: be a market leader in all business lines, double the number of relevant customer interactions and enlarge our mobility, SME [subject-matter expert], and life & health ecosystems, with new third-party services, which go beyond the insurance business. The key level of that is to grow and innovate fast and provide services that our competitors don’t. Hence, key levers of our strategy are time to market and scalability of our services and products. We strongly believe that Red Hat OpenShift product fully supports us in executing our vision. Shifting development power from technology work to innovation work is what we want to do.
Question: What is the next big challenge in your business?
Answer: We now have an application landscape of about 330 applications, including 20 SAP applications and about 30 mainframe applications. About 190 are decentralized applications and the majority of them are Java™- and Linux®-based. Today, we have very few applications in the public cloud, because we need to keep customer-specific and sensitive data within the jurisdiction of Switzerland. That’s why we currently have an on-premise cloud with Red Hat OpenShift on top.
The next big challenge we will undergo in 2021 is the migration of all our applications—with the exception of the SAP systems—from the private cloud into the public managed clouds which have datacenters in Switzerland, Microsoft Azure, and GCP. We are aiming to complete this migration by the end of 2023.
Question: How is Red Hat helping you with this challenge?
Answer: With Red Hat OpenShift, we can migrate our application stacks in the same container from on-premise to the public cloud with very little effort. This is a great opportunity for improving our time to market, for resilience and stability of our applications, and for focusing on innovation, while gaining financial transparency and business flexibility. We will start with this next year, so by the end of 2023 we don’t need our own datacenter anymore. It’s not a core competence for an insurance company to run technology. We should have a core expertise on delivering customer value fast. That’s why we need the help of Red Hat.
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Digital Transformation is redefining the future of health care and health delivery. All stakeholders are convinced that these innovations will create value for patients, healthcare practitioners, hospitals, and governments along the patient pathway. The benefits are starting from prevention and awareness to diagnosis, treatment, short- and long-term follow-up, and ultimately survival. But how do you make sure that your working towards an architecturally sound, secure and interoperable health IT ecosystem for your hospital and avoid implementing a hodgepodge of spot solutions? How does your IT department work together with the other stakeholders, such as the doctors and other healthcare practitioners, Life Sciences companies, Tech companies, regulators and your internal governance and administrative bodies?
Read MoreThe Telenet Business Leadership Circle powered by CIONET, offers a platform where IT executives and thought leaders can meet to inspire each other and share best practices. We want to be a facilitator who helps you optimise the performance of your IT function and your business by embracing the endless opportunities that digital change brings.
Read MoreDécouvrez la dynamique du leadership numérique aux Rencontres de CIONET, le programme francophone exclusif de CIONET pour les leaders numériques en Belgique, rendu possible grâce au soutien et à l'engagement de nos partenaires de programme : Deloitte, Denodo et Red Hat. Rejoignez trois événements inspirants par an à Liège, Namur et en Brabant Wallon, où des CIOs et des experts numériques francophones de premier plan partagent leurs perspectives et expériences sur des thèmes d'affaires et de IT actuels. Laissez-vous inspirer et apprenez des meilleurs du secteur lors de sessions captivantes conçues spécialement pour soutenir et enrichir votre rôle en tant que CIO pair. Ne manquez pas cette opportunité de faire partie d'un réseau exceptionnel d'innovateurs numériques !
Read MoreCIONET is committed to highlighting and celebrating female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, creating a leadership programme that empowers and elevates women within the tech industry. This initiative is dedicated to showcasing the achievements and successes of leading women, fostering an environment where female role models are recognised, and their contributions can ignite progress and inspire the next generation of women in IT. Our mission is to shine the spotlight a little brighter on female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, and to empower each other through this inner network community.
Read MoreWould you like to know more about CIONET Belgium, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!
You can either send us a registered handwritten letter explaining why you'd like to become a member or you can simply talk to us right here!