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Belgium 11-12-25 Country Members Physical english

Next Generation Digital Twins - CIONET Belgium: Community Event

Imagine being able to monitor, simulate, and optimise an entire city, factory, or supply chain in real time. Next-generation digital twins are making this vision a reality, transforming how we manage and understand complex systems. By creating dynamic virtual replicas of physical assets and processes, digital twins allow organisations to predict issues, optimize performance, and make data-driven decisions with unprecedented accuracy.This event will explore how digital twins are being used across industries to revolutionize the way we operate and maintain large-scale, intricate systems—whether it’s the infrastructure of a smart city, the efficiency of a factory floor, or the resilience of global supply chains.Examples of Digital Twins in Action:Smart Cities: Urban planners can use digital twins to simulate traffic flow, monitor energy usage, or predict the impact of weather events on infrastructure. This enables cities to optimize resources and improve the quality of life for their citizens.Factories of the Future: Manufacturing plants are leveraging digital twins to monitor equipment in real time, prevent downtime, and optimize production lines. With predictive analytics, factories can avoid costly breakdowns and improve overall efficiency.Supply Chain Management: Complex supply chains, spanning continents and industries, can be modeled as digital twins to track shipments, simulate disruptions, and optimize logistics. Businesses can reduce inefficiencies and respond faster to market demands.Key Themes:Real-Time Monitoring and Simulation: How digital twins provide real-time insights into complex systems, allowing for dynamic response and optimization.Predictive Power: Leveraging AI and data analytics, digital twins help organisations predict and mitigate issues before they happen, from equipment failures to supply chain bottlenecks.Scalability Across Ecosystems: Digital twins aren’t limited to individual assets—learn how they can be scaled across entire ecosystems like smart cities or global supply chains for maximum impact.Building Trust and Security: With digital twins handling critical infrastructure and sensitive data, what are the security and governance frameworks needed to ensure trust in these virtual systems?Why You Should Attend:Next-generation digital twins are no longer just a concept—they are revolutionizing industries by offering a new way to manage complexity. Whether you’re looking to optimize a city, factory, or supply chain, this event will provide practical insights into how digital twins can transform your organisation’s operations and drive future innovation.

Belgium 12-12-25 Squad Only Physical english

Managing IT Cost Without Losing Capability ; A practical look at how to control infrastructure, apps, and dev spend

Everyone wants value for money. But in IT, that value is spread across infrastructure, software, services, and people. Your infra spend is creeping up. App maintenance is eating your budget. New development is exciting but comes with hidden overhead. And people costs, from operations to engineering, remain the largest, most overlooked slice. If you’re under pressure to optimise without compromise, this session brings the right questions, trade-offs, and shared lessons to the table.

Belgium 16-12-25 Invitation Only Physical english

CIONET Round Table: Mastering Enterprise Service Management

This CIONET Round Table will focus on how the IT department can be the enabler that unlocks organisational efficiencies and helps to improve the employee experience. We will explore how CIOs and Digital Leaders can fundamentally transform the internal service experience by breaking down organizational silos, orchestrating complex cross-functional workflows, and leveraging a unified platform to deliver a truly frictionless experience for every employee.

December 12, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Physical english

Managing IT Cost Without Losing Capability ; A practical look at how to control infrastructure, apps, and dev spend

January 13, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

Moving Legacy Systems to the Cloud Efficiently : Balancing cost, risk, and continuity in complex migrations

Migrating legacy systems to the cloud remains one of the toughest balancing acts in IT. Every choice affects stability, cost, and trust at once, and what starts as a modernisation effort quickly turns into a negotiation between ambition and reality. Suddenly budgets rise, dependencies appear late, and timelines tighten as old architectures collide with new expectations. In the end, success depends on sequencing, ownership, and aligning business priorities with infrastructure limits, and not only on technical readiness. Making it work requires more than a plan on paper. Knowing which systems genuinely belong in the cloud, which can wait, and which should stay put shapes the entire roadmap and defines its success. Each refactoring decision sets the level of future flexibility, but it also drives cost and risk. The trade-offs between speed, sustainability, and resilience only become clear once migration begins and pressure builds. Let’s discuss how to plan migrations that stay on track, manage hidden dependencies, and handle downtime with confidence. Let’s also discuss how governance, testing, and vendor coordination keep progress visible and credible. Are you in? A closed conversation for those who turn cloud migration from a disruption into a long-term advantage.

January 22, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

AI-Driven Development: Redesigning workflows, responsibilities, and trust in the age of automation

AI coding assistants entered development teams quietly, but their impact grows by the day. What started as autocomplete now shapes architecture decisions, documentation, and testing. And when productivity gains are visible, so are new risks: security blind spots, uneven quality, and the slow erosion of shared standards. Teams move faster, but not always in the same direction. The challenge has become integration rather than adoption. And new questions have risen: how do you blend automation into established practices without losing oversight? When is human review still essential, and what should the rules of collaboration between developer and machine look like? As AI tools learn from proprietary code, where do responsibility and accountability sit? Let’s talk about how to redefine those workflows, balancing creativity with control, and protecting code quality in a hybrid human-AI environment. A closed conversation on where AI accelerates progress, where it introduces new debt, and how development culture must evolve to stay credible.

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Puratos Enhances Customer and Employee Experiences with OutSystems

Puratos decided to look for a solution that would provide the company with limitless innovation while enabling it to keep up with the constant new developments in the food industry. Since adopting OutSystems, the platform has become a strategic technology in Puratos’ digital transformation.

"The versatility of the OutSystems development platform makes it possible to solve problems without limitations and innovate fast by lowering the technological threshold."

Gerasimos KouloumpisICT Digital Architects Manager and Customer Experience Applications Manager, Puratos

Challenge

Searching for a solution to enhance customer and employee experiences

Based in Belgium, Puratos is a global manufacturing company that supplies bakers, pastry chefs, chocolatiers, and large industrial customers with cutting-edge services and ingredients.

Founded in 1919 as a father-and-son operation, the company has evolved into a successful international business focused on creating exceptional customer and employee experiences while positively impacting society. Regarding the latter, the company is determined to achieve sustainable water usage, waste reduction and carbon neutrality by 2025.

This way, when Puratos creates innovative food solutions for companies that put health and well-being first, it is also helping customers, people, and the planet grow sustainably.

To achieve this vision, the company monitors consumer opinion in several regions and cultures of the world. This requires Puratos employees to look for ways to exchange information with customers and partners at the right time, as the right solution at the right time can make all the difference.

Therefore, a flexible and robust IT environment is non-negotiable, and nothing should prevent rapid response to market developments.

That’s why Puratos decided to look for a low-code development platform. After a careful evaluation, the company chose OutSystems high-performance low-code platform and ForTrevo as its implementation partner.

Why Puratos chose OutSystems:

Full-stack visual development with no limits
Powerful integration
Deliver public-facing web apps and portals

“Choosing OutSystems and ForTrevo experts doesn’t just facilitate rapid, targeted development of new business applications; it also streamlines integration with current ERP, CRM, and content management systems.” - Olga DuarteCEO, ForTrevo

Solution

Delivering new solutions that foster inspiration and collaboration

As Puratos’ Group ICT Digital Architects Manager and Customer Experience Applications Manager, Gerasimos Kouloumpis is intimately involved in application management and development. When asked why Puratos chose OutSystems to tackle its development needs, Kouloumpis highlighted the platform’s versatility:

“You can solve problems without restrictions. The development platform helps lower the threshold, technologically speaking, so we can focus on what matters to the business. That’s true for applications developed in OutSystems and solutions that integrate OutSystems with applications currently used in our complex business landscape. The result is a series of user-friendly solutions that align with the right business objectives.”

Since adopting OutSystems, Puratos has delivered several applications that ensure the company’s digital competitive edge.

The list includes:

Online platform to promote and encourage recipe collaboration: this solution is a true differentiator in the industry. Users can create and share recipes while adding nutritional calculations and recommendations. Thanks to its intuitive user interface, the solution is being used by over 1,500 bakers, pastry chefs, and chocolatiers worldwide. Since it first launched, the application has been expanded with a second module to give customers a similar experience.
Process flow solutions: Puratos has delivered several solutions to support its R&D department to control process flows such as sample orders, baked goods testing and conducting relevant analyses.
Solutions to identify and monitor nutrients and ingredients: the Quality Control Department uses the OutSystems technology in tandem with other state-of-the-art technology to identify and monitor nutrients and ingredients.
myPuratos: a digital hub used by thousands of Puratos customers in 20+ countries. The company uses OutSystems to orchestrate the data flow and business rules between global ERP, CRM, and CMS environments and for integrations with third-party online payment service providers.

Results

Digital Innovation is now part of the Puratos’ DNA

Since adopting OutSystems, Puratos has reduced the lead time for innovation. Kouloumpis explained:

“Now, we can quickly create a Proof of Value (PoV) for certain functionality or applications and validate business ideas in the digital world. Imagine personalized baking solutions, for instance. Within a few weeks, we have a viable result and an application developed, tested, and validated. Business users are pleased by what IT can deliver. That’s partially attributable to the intuitive, accessible nature of the OutSystems development platform.”

Partner

ForTrevo

ForTrevo's team designs and develops innovative web, reactive & mobile applications, using OutSystems platform. Our team of Certified OutSystems Developers is strongly skilled and committed to...

Learn more about ForTrevo

Another aspect of the OutSystems platform highlighted by Kouloumpis is how the OutSystems platform blended with the rest of the Puratos digital landscape. The way it didn’t change the IT team’s way of working was critical to make OutSystems an instrumental platform in Puratos’ digital transformation journey.

Now, innovation isn’t held captive by a rigid IT environment; it’s validated and rolled out quickly. As for future customer and employee experiences, they’ll continue to become more and more tailored.

Technologies

Outsystems

CIONET Business Circles

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?

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.

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 !

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.