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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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National Express drives into the future with webMethods.io Integration in the cloud

National Express UK is a leading British public transport operator with bus and coach services. It is part of Mobico Group, which operates in 12 countries and its 51,000 employees help millions of people get to work, to their loved ones, and beyond—safely, and on time—365 days a year.

New Challenges

Need for an omnichannel approach
Dynamic pricing and consistent travel options
Third-party, integrated journeys and sales
Creating a unified Mobility-as-a-Service with API

Key Benefits

Integrated all systems for a single source of truth
Built reusable microservices and rich APIs
Scaled new cloud-powered revenue by 1600% in one year
Increased website revenue from 60% to 80%
Prepared for Mobility-as-a-Service

Software AG Solutions

webMethods.io Integration and API Management

“Mobility-as-a-Service is the future, and we intend to be in the driver’s seat. We value the genuine partnership with Software AG that is helping make our journey possible.”

- Alan Brooks | CTO | Mobico Group

"One platform" for every journey

Since its founding in 1972, National Express UK has embraced technological innovation both online and off. As a result, the company’s website was already driving 60% of group revenue by 2013. However, being in the fast lane online while also having legacy kiosks, on-transport operator sales and call centers, led to disparate systems, siloed data, and vendor solutions that required a workaround approach to communicate.

“Aside from increasing costs and complexity from running half a dozen walled-off systems,” says Alan Brooks, CTO, Mobico Group, “the most troubling part was that a customer not only saw drastically different, non-targeted prices across channels, but he or she actually encountered different routes and journeys depending on the channel. That was a major problem.”

The solution? Build fully integrated, omni-channel capabilities. The way to do it? With webMethods.io Integration — on-premises and in the cloud.

By creating what Brooks and his team nicknamed ”one platform” internally, National Express unified its data and integrated it across all channels to deliver targeted, dynamic pricing and consistent, seamless journey options that not only made customers smile—but boosted third-party integrated revenue by as much as 16x in just one year.

The secret ingredient

“Software AG and webMethods.io Integration are absolutely the glue that brings it all together for us,” says Brooks.

For instance, in the coach business at National Express in the UK, logic for rules governing customer journeys, price ladders, price points and more is embedded in microservices, with webMethods supporting rich APIs so that everything is built on a fully-integrated, unified foundation. These microservices are highly reusable across all channels and capacities. So once a payments microservice was developed for the web—it could also be used in kiosks, call centers and everywhere else that National Express accepts customer payments.

But reusability doesn’t end there. Beyond its coach business, National Express is responsible for the overwhelming majority of urban bus trips in the UK’s West Midlands, buses and coaches for Premier League matches and special accessibility transportation, so everybody has access to mobility no matter their physical situation.

Cloud super-scaling

“Our industry advantage as one of the first users of webMethods in the cloud was huge,” says Brooks. “Easy, flexible, fast cloud-based scalability opened a major new channel for us to offer exclusive coach journeys directly via the largest online retailer of train tickets in the UK, seamlessly with their own journeys. Since we didn’t know what kind of volume we’d encounter, the cloud was the way to go.”

Best of all, webMethods.io Integration in the cloud has made it possible for National Express to keep adding new vendors and expanding across borders. Our integration to transport aggregation platforms has enabled travelers from Europe to purchase our services easily before they even leave the house, all thanks to webMethods and its cloud-based, super-scaling ability.

Mobility-as-a-Service

A single smart-card, ticket or app powering any form of local transportation in a seamless experience is the future of urban and regional transportation. And instead of waiting for a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform to come to National Express, letting someone else shape how it looks—the company is harnessing webMethods to build its own MaaS platform, providing APIs other transportation companies can integrate.

Not only does this ensure that National Express doesn’t have to rely on someone else’s timelines, but it gives the company powerful access to data that can drive critical decisions in the future.

“Mobility-as-a-Service is the future, and we intend to be in the driver’s seat,” says Brooks, “but the truth is that such an agile, flexible, forward-looking approach is only possible when you’re working with a real partner, not just another vendor. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to look at alternatives, but what keeps me coming back to Software AG is our partnership. It’s something you cannot buy.”

Technologies

Software AG API management - WEBMETHODS.IO Software AG Application Integration - WEBMETHODS.IO

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.