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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 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

20 Years CIONET - CIONET Belgium: Summer Festival

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership.Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.This is more than a celebration—it’s an opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and recharge with your fellow digital leaders. Don't miss this exclusive experience packed with inspiring talks, networking opportunities, and special recognitions that highlight the best of CIONET’s history and future.Let’s celebrate the past, present, and future of the digital community you helped build.

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Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership. Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.

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Belgium 2-9-25 All TRIBERS Virtual english

What Does It Cost to Host an App? ; A practical guide to calculating hosting costs across infra, licenses, and operations

You’ve been asked a simple question: “What does it cost to host this application?” But the answer is anything but simple. The platform sits across multiple data centres. The app spans a few VMs, shares a backup system, uses licensed monitoring, and touches five different teams. Your CMDB should help, but it’s rigid, outdated, or incomplete. And yet, you still need to provide a number, clear, explainable, and grounded in reality.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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August 5, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

AI Act – praktyka stosowania na rynku polskim

AI Act – dyrektywa unijna regulująca wiele zasad wykorzystania AI w modelach biznesowych- już obowiązuje na polskim rynki. Ciekawe są prawdziwe i realne przypadki jej stosowania. Spójrzmy na temat od strony regulacyjnej, czyli prawnej. Ale zobaczmy praktykę aktywnej w temacie kancelarii prawnej. Zaprosiliśmy mecenaskę Aleksandrę Maciejewicz z kancelarii Lawmore, która od dłuższego czasu jest niezwykle aktywna i praktykuje w tym temacie. Poznamy podstawę prawną, praktyczne case’y i opis sytuacji oczami prawdziwego praktyka.

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August 6, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

DORA: wszystko, co chcielibyście wiedzieć, a baliście się zapytać

Michał Kulesza, adwokat, partner w departamencie technologicznym kancelarii Rymarz Zdort Maruta i szef zespołu regulacji ICT, przeprowadzi nas przez kluczowe wątki rozporządzenia i zmierzy się z pytaniami zgłoszonymi przez uczestników. Omówimy zarówno krytyczne aspekty na początku wdrożeń, jak i dostrajanie zmian na poziomie organizacyjnym i strategicznym. Masz konkretny temat, który warto poruszyć? Zgłoś go w trakcie rejestracji. Zamiast czytać między wierszami DORA – porozmawiajmy o tym wprost.

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August 7, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Automated Systems Testing

Duże tempo developmentu i dokonywanych zmian wymaga nowej klasy testowania. Jakość systemów obserwowana na produkcji będzie pochodną skuteczności tego procesu. Duże nadzieje wiążemy z platformami wspierającymi testowanie i opartymi na AI. Sesja ta pokaże, gdzie jesteśmy w poszukiwaniu takich rozwiązań i gdzie ewaluuje myślenie szefów testów i ich rozwiązania organizacyjne.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

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E.ON Italy cuts costs by 50 percent and gains insight with Azure SQL Database Hyperscale

E.ON runs its data and analytical workloads mostly in the cloud, distributed across different data service backends. In 2017, E.ON Italy aimed to modernize its on-premises data estate by moving all data to Azure SQL Database.

Over time, the data volume, data processing needs, and analytics requirements grew as E.ON needed to ingest, process, and analyze more and more data from its growing user base. Looking for ways to scale well beyond its current data volume without restrictions on storage and compute to stay “fit for the future,” E.ON decided to modernize once again. It upgraded its database service and analytics platform to Azure SQL Hyperscale service tier. Azure SQL Database Hyperscale provides dynamic accommodation for storage space (up to 100 terabytes) as well as analytics and transactional support for both internal users and customers.

The important thing for us is that we have an open mind not just for technology, but for innovation. Every new solution is a way to find the best options, to learn the most about how we can improve our operations.  Enrico Lapel: Data & Analytics manager - E.ON Italy

Powered by insight

Power is a vital part of modern life, and to many customers in Europe, E.ON is the company powering their homes and businesses. E.ON started in Germany but has spread across the continent, with each of its national branches choosing the technology and database solutions that work best for their specific needs, all with the goal of providing reliable and sustainable energy across Europe.

For E.ON Italy, it was clear that cloud computing was the future as far back as 2017. The company invested in a move to the cloud on Azure SQL Database that year, immediately improving data accessibility for the company. But as the years went by, E.ON Italy found that moving its Data Insights Platform (DIP) onto the server along with more data meant they were consistently running out of space.

The DIP provides customers with access to historical data regarding usage and rates while also giving the company a clear picture of energy usage, customer history, and anticipated spikes in demand. Its analytics are crucial to E.ON Italy making the best decisions for its customers and the company as a whole. A lack of space on the backend and potential slowdown in analysis could negatively impact operations.

To provide the best service for around one million contracts on the Italian peninsula, E.ON Italy needed to advance its technology. So the company turned to the Azure SQL Database Hyperscale tier to solve its data growth challenges and storage space issues while remaining centered on the cloud. The Azure SQL Hyperscale tier allows companies to easily and automatically scale up and down as necessary, with optimized pricing for the processing used and higher overall performance and speed for large data projects. E.ON Italy estimates it’s saving nearly 50 percent in costs per year and is achieving a 30 percent native performance increase for online transactional processing. 

A move toward better operation

For E.ON Italy, working with Microsoft was an opportunity to incorporate new technology with an expert provider. “Microsoft gave us the right advice at the right moment, and they married a deep tech knowledge with an understanding of our vision for the future,” says Enrico Lapel, Data & Analytics manager at E.ON Italy. The company migrated the server by having the existing database running concurrently with the Azure SQL Database Hyperscale database, ensuring that the new solution was stable and could handle the necessary data bandwidth. Only once E.ON Italy felt satisfied with the performance of the new Hyperscale Service tier over several weeks, it fully moved live operations onto the new Azure SQL Database service tier.

From a financial standpoint, the cost benefits for E.ON were felt immediately. Even without the performance advantages considered, the new database service costs half as much as the original implementation. But with up to 100 terabytes of data storage, the new database also ensures that E.ON Italy has a significantly larger amount of space available to produce a longer history for customers and general operational data. “The wonderful thing about scaling on Hyperscale is that it’s easy. I don’t have to care about scaling up, it just handles it, and so I can focus on important data,” says Lapel.

It also frees additional space up for the DIP to provide more detailed analyses of larger data sets. E.ON Italy is using Azure Machine Learning and Power BI as part of its data projects, providing a holistic view of energy needs and consumption, sales churn, and next-best actions for future upselling. Having faster access to more reliable data means that E.ON Italy is capable of greater insight and its data scientists can deliver better guidance for future developments.

The speed of E.ON Italy’s move to a better solution has ensured that the customer-facing side of the business never has to deal with performance or reliability issues anymore. Instead, customers can simply enjoy a smoother and improved journey with the help of the company’s new technology.

Improvement and innovation

As a forward-looking company, E.ON Italy is not content to rest on its laurels when it comes to the technology foundation established by using the Azure SQL Hyperscale database tier. Already the company is planning additional analytics projects along with improved data governance and potentially incorporating Microsoft tools such as Power Apps.

The team is looking into how to improve sustainability efforts via this added insight. Greater access to data means providing a better view of how customers are using energy and how to better manage their needs. That can both reduce necessary energy consumption and improve the overall impact of E.ON Italy’s operations by cutting down on wasted energy use.

As the team at E.ON Italy sees it, it’s all about the journey. “The important thing for us is that we have an open mind not just for technology, but for innovation,” says Lapel. “Every new solution is a way to find the best options, to learn the most about how we can improve our operations.”

E.ON Italy is still moving forward and innovating, showing what can be done with scalable and dynamic data & AI services in Azure to both improve internal operations and customer journeys. Whatever new innovations are put forth in the future, it seems fair to assume that the company will be looking ahead and investigating how new technology can offer innovative solutions.

 

The wonderful thing about scaling on Hyperscale is that it’s easy. I don’t have to care about scaling up, it just handles it, and so I can focus on important data.  Enrico Lapel: Data & Analytics manager - E.ON Italy

 

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
Untitled design (1)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-57-AM
Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
Euroclear
1-Feb-29-2024-11-34-59-8990-AM
Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
Untitled design-Nov-22-2023-08-42-05-3178-AM
Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
Johnson & Johnson
Piet_De_Ceuleners
Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
1658251930890
Dirk De Bevere
Large Enterprise Sales Leader
Telenet Business
Untitled design-7
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
Kevin_Ledegen
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
Untitled design (4)-Dec-13-2023-10-53-15-5032-AM
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
1726588748718
Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
Agence du Numérique
an swalens
An Swalens
Head Of IT (CIO)
National Bank of Belgium
Untitled design (2)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-68-AM
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

Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
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
Founder - MD
Untitled design (1)-2
Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
1-Dec-16-2021-02-15-57-02-PM
Eman De Sutter
Program Manager
4-Feb-08-2022-10-22-09-03-AM
Shelly Deracourt
Program Manager
Untitled design (5)-Sep-01-2022-02-47-55-60-PM
Charlotte Coen
Partner Success Manager
Untitled design (1)-Nov-22-2023-08-56-42-6802-AM
Ivana Bradvica
Junior Event Manager
ML B-W-1
Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller
Vlera Berishaa (1)
Vlera Berisha
Junior Community Manager
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Programme & Event 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!