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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

Realise your ambition! Connect with your local community of digital leaders.

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Upcoming Events

 
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Belgium 25-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english

Women of CIONET - Female Leadership Circle 2

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.

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Belgium 25-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english

Red Hat Round Table: THE POWER OF HYBRID

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.

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Belgium 30-9-25 Squad Only Virtual english

Technical Debt: When to Pay It and When to Walk Away ; Making smart trade-offs between progress, maintenance, and risk

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.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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September 30, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english

Technical Debt: When to Pay It and When to Walk Away ; Making smart trade-offs between progress, maintenance, and risk

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.

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October 2, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english

The Career Path of the Architect ;Great architecture begins with great architects

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.

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October 14, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english

Agile Infrastructure ; How to build technical foundations that don’t slow you down

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.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

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ABB’s Genix Edge AI extends the potential of industrial condition monitoring and analytics to micro-PCs with AKS Edge Essentials

ABB has improved production through efficient data analysis by leveraging Azure Kubernetes Service to unify edge and cloud solutions to simplify application development and management.

AKS Edge Essentials is deployment agnostic, so we need to deploy only one application regardless of where it runs, whether on a minimally configured Windows IoT device, a large machine with Linux, or in the cloud. AKS Edge Essentials removes that complexity.  - Viswanathan Ramakrishnan: Vice President, Release Engineering & SaaS Operations - ABB

Gaining the edge on industrial intelligence

ABB is a leader in using electrification and automation technology to create more sustainable and resource-efficient processes and operations for its diverse group of customers. ABB solutions optimize the way things are manufactured, moved, powered, and operated. For more than 140 years, ABB has led the way in driving innovations that accelerate industrial transformation.

Massive amounts of industrial data are collected every day through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). One major source of that data is condition monitoring data that reflects asset health and environmental safety in manufacturing equipment and facilities. A wide range of measurements, including gas emissions, electrical performance, vibration analytics, fluid and air pressure, and many others, are collected through hundreds of sensors and edge devices.

ABB offers multiple edge deployments through its Genix Industrial Analytics and AI suite that are used within its own operations and are offered to customers. As a gateway offering, Genix Edge AI collects thousands of points of data per second through edge devices and sends them to the Genix cloud, where they are stored and analyzed. As an operations technology (OT) analytics package, Genix Edge AI is used in highly regulated environments, or those without reliable internet connectivity, to collect and store the data on the edge device and perform processing or visualization on the machine. Finally, the Genix Edge AI OT Analytics and AI package with AI tools for machine learning is used to identify and analyze anomalies in the condition data and then either automatically adjust the system or alert an engineer that a problem is brewing.

Hundreds of edge devices are distributed globally across ABB operations and customer factories. Until 2019, many were typically Windows-based micro-PCs running in a simple client server environment. In the years since, ABB has migrated many of those edge workloads to Docker containers managed by Docker-based orchestration systems.

As the number of applications and devices increased, ABB found these solutions couldn’t scale to meet the growing and changing enterprise-level needs. Its developers also often had to build different versions of an application for the cloud, and for Windows and Linux.

Streamlining Kubernetes management of tiny edges

When ABB started developing Genix Datalyzer in 2021, it realized the need for a Kubernetes orchestration system that would allow it to run its edge workloads on Linux or Windows on hundreds of existing Windows-based devices. Genix Datalyzer is an enterprise-grade, cloud-based analyzer fleet monitoring solution. It combines industrial analytics and AI into an enterprise-level AI of things (AIoT) solution that unlocks the value of data collected from large-scale, disbursed industrial environments. 

“Genix Datalyzer needs to be deployed in a Kubernetes environment, sometimes on a small-scale PC and sometimes in the cloud. We wanted the orchestration to be consistent and require minimal development so we didn’t have to build it twice,“ says Vinod Ninan, Vice President of Product Management at ABB.

When ABB learned that AKS Edge Essentials meets those requirements and runs on smaller Windows-based devices that have lower compute and memory capacity, it contacted Microsoft to learn more. “We met with the Microsoft Edge product managers in late 2022 and articulated our need for an offering that we can use across edge and cloud in the same fashion,” recalls Ninan.

ABB was invited to participate in an early-access preview program evaluating AKS Edge Essentials with Genix Datalyzer.

Genix Datalyzer needs to be deployed in a Kubernetes environment, sometimes on a small-scale PC and sometimes in the cloud. We wanted the orchestration to be consistent and require minimal development so we didn’t have to build it twice. - Viswanathan Ramakrishnan: Vice President, Release Engineering & SaaS Operations - ABB

Picture graph explaining AKS Edge Essentials

Increasing performance and security

AKS Edge Essentials provides ABB with a highly scalable and reliable platform for managing containerized applications on the edge. “With AKS Edge Essentials, we can easily deploy, manage, and scale our AIoT analytics application on a compact and low-power device, which gives us more flexibility,” explains Viswanathan Ramakrishnan, Vice President of Release Engineering & SaaS Operations at ABB. “That means we can install it on most of our customers’ existing hardware and in remote locations where access to the cloud may be limited or unreliable.”

Robust load balancing and networking capabilities ensure that Genix Datalyzer is highly available and can handle traffic spikes without any downtime. Service discovery and automatic DNS management in AKS Edge Essentials make it easy to securely connect the application to other services and devices.

“Enhanced security and control features in AKS Edge Essentials help us to secure our AIoT analytics application on the edge and grant or restrict access based on user roles,” says Ramakrishnan.

Building one version for all platforms

By using AKS Edge Essentials to unify its edge and cloud data collection and processing, ABB will be able to create a single version of an application that provides consistent, repeatable, and scalable results whether on-premises or in the cloud. 

“AKS Edge Essentials is deployment agnostic, so we need to deploy only one application regardless of where it runs, whether on a minimally configured Windows-based micro-PC, a large machine with Linux, or in the cloud. AKS Edge Essentials removes that complexity,” explains Ramakrishnan. This streamlined approach is already reducing development and deployment time by almost half.

ABB will also use Azure Arc in combination with AKS Edge Essentials as a single control plane to remotely manage and monitor the entire lifecycle of its Kubernetes deployments. “Using Azure Arc to manage our deployments gives us an ecosystem that integrates the entire fleet of applications into a single window,” says Ramakrishnan.

Using Azure Arc, customers can manage both Azure and non-Azure resources—such as virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and on-premises databases—as though they were native Azure resources, whether they reside on-premises, at the edge, or in other public clouds.

Focusing on a more sustainable future

ABB is committed to helping optimize operations and meeting sustainability goals for both its own organization and for its customers. With the help of AKS Edge Essentials and Azure Arc, ABB will be able to quickly develop and deploy new apps that help further those goals.

“We have a whole GreenOps methodology in place,” says Ramakrishnan. “We are optimizing our code with green coding mechanisms by which we can proactively identify places where we don’t need to always operate at the highest level of efficiency. We can then taper down operations at certain times to consume less power.”

ABB is also exploring opportunities to deploy datacenters in areas where they can be powered by renewable energy.

Making predictive maintenance a reality

By reducing development and deployment complexity for such applications with the help of AKS Edge Essentials, ABB will make predictive maintenance more practical. The ability to affordably monitor assets 24/7 will allow ABB and its customers to identify anomalies much quicker than if relying on periodic condition monitoring. More timely data will drive more timely adjustments to help avoid costly downtime or fines from failing to meet emissions requirements.

The initial pilots of AKS Edge Essentials showed that ABB will be able to help customers to accelerate the deployment time of such solutions.

“I want to underscore the forward-looking significance of AKS Edge Essentials in elevating the customer experience in the condition monitoring space. By integrating modern technologies and advanced analytics into our devices, we are poised to provide customers with a forward-looking and seamless user experience in edge and cloud,” says Anshul Arora, Lead Product Manager for Genix Datalyzer and NextGen Condition Monitoring at ABB.

What’s next

ABB will start expanding the use of Genix Datalyzer running on AKS Edge Essentials and Azure Arc to its customers starting in 2024. “Our rollout plan is to migrate hundreds of edge devices to this new AKS Edge Essentials environment in the next few years,” says Ramakrishnan.

I want to underscore the forward-looking significance of AKS Edge Essentials in elevating the customer experience in the condition monitoring space. By integrating modern technologies and advanced analytics into our devices, we are poised to provide customers with a forward-looking and seamless user experience in edge and cloud. - Anshul Arora: Lead Product Manager for Genix Datalyzer and NextGen Condition Monitoring - ABB

 

Partners

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

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Healthcare Circle

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?

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Telenet Business Leadership Circle

The 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.

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Les Rencontres

Découvrez 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 !

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Female Leadership Circle

CIONET 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.

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Check out our latest news

Testimonials

Geert Goethals
Geert Goethals
CIO
Sibelga
Bahadir Samli
Bahadir Samli
CIO
ING Belgique
2-Feb-29-2024-11-35-00-9309-AM
Bart Kerkhofs
Vice President & Head of IT
Bridgestone EMIA
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Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
Euroclear
1-Feb-29-2024-11-34-59-8990-AM
Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
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Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
Johnson & Johnson
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Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
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Dirk De Bevere
Large Enterprise Sales Leader
Telenet Business
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Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
Red Hat
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Geert Lejon
Geert Lejon
Vice President Head of Belux / Head of Comms Benelux
Cognizant
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Kevin Ledegen
Group IT director
SDWorx
Gunter-Van-Craen_Small
Gunter Van Craen
Chief Digital & Information Officer
Bekaert
Thomas Kessler
Thomas Kessler
Partner | CIO Programme Leader
Deloitte
Emmanuel Gob
Emmanuel Gob
CIO
DPD
pascal pauwels
Pascal Pauwels
CIO
Colruyt
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Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
Dell Technologies
benoit dewaele
Benoît Dewaele
Group IT Directo
Vandemoortele
Dirk Deridder-1
Dirk Deridder
CTO - Technology Services & Practices
SMALS
Thierry Driesens
Thierry Driesens
CIO
TVH
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Koen Vandaele
CIO
Delen Private Bank
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Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
Kyndryl BeLux
steven-vermeulen
Steven Vermeulen
CIO
Digitaal Vlaanderen
Jack Hamande
Jack Hamande
Director General Digital Transformation
Federale Overheidsdienst Beleid en Ondersteuning
Tom Tomczak
Tom Tomczak
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
NRB
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Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
Agence du Numérique
an swalens
An Swalens
Head Of IT (CIO)
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Elke Laeremans
Chief Digital & Supply Chain Officer at Casa International
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Koen Van Loo
Koen Van Loo
CIO
Group S.
Peter Sany
Peter Sany
Executive Advisor
Zoom
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Steven De Haes
Steven De Haes
Dean
Antwerp Management School
Marleen Thorré
Marleen Thorré
Head of Digital EMEA
Mitsubishi Chemical Group
christel-plessers
Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
Mercedes-Benz Europe
bauduin cor
Baudouin Corlùy
Chief Market Development Officer
LCL Data Centers

Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
Partner - CEO
Inès De Bien
Inès De Bien
Partner - CCO
1-Feb-08-2022-10-22-08-68-AM
Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
Hendrik Deckers
Hendrik Deckers
Partner - Founder
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Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Programme Director
1-Dec-16-2021-02-15-57-02-PM
Eman De Sutter
Programme Manager
4-Feb-08-2022-10-22-09-03-AM
Shelly Deracourt
Programme Manager
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Charlotte Coen
Partner Success Manager
Untitled design (1)-Nov-22-2023-08-56-42-6802-AM
Ivana Bradvica
Programme Manager
ML B-W-1
Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller
Vlera Berishaa (1)
Vlera Berisha
Community Manager
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Programme Manager

Contact us

Would you like to know more about CIONET Belgium, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!