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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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An electrifying disruption for the entire racing industry Integration and IoT plus the connected car on a green racetrack

The Electric Racing Academy (ERA) is the world’s first all-electric junior formula racing series. Founded by Beth Georgiou, Rudi Penders, and Dieter Vanswijgenhoven in Belgium, its mission is to transform motorsports by making it more sustainable, equitable, and accessible.

Challenges
Improving the racing experience for drivers, engineer teams and fans. Providing real-time data for coaches and drivers. Using technology to lower barriers of entry and promote accessibility. Taking racing green.
 
 
Outcomes
Provided high-frequency, real-time telemetry data on the thin edge. Achieved live data insights at a level only ever realized by F1. Included driver messaging to enrich telemetry, for a continuous flow of performance insights. Immersed race enthusiasts in a thrilling, more data-enhanced experience.
 
Solutions
  • webMethods.io
  • Cumulocity IoT
  • Thin Edge
 
 "The Electric Racing Academy (ERA) is using data to democratize motorsports. Now we are able to provide racing insights to our drivers and team in real-time, collaborate via a shared IoT platform with eager technophiles and start to innovate around a better fan experience. All this, in turn, attracts a new, diverse generation of driving talent. It’s literally a win-win."

- Beth Georgiou, Sporting Director ERA

 

Transforming motorsports with a truly connected vehicle

Electric. Raw. Power. With intelligence.

The Mitsu-Bachi F110e is an electrified beast. An incredibly intelligent, truly-connected, foot-to-the-floor powerhouse.

Bringing ERA’s vision to reality meant taking on an ambitious project to generate real-time racing data for drivers, coaches, teams, and fans. It’s a vision powered by a fluid flow of data streaming off IoT and other internal and external sources. It’s a vision that represents a future where competition isn’t about who can afford the most expensive car—but who can master the technology to create a democratized environment open to everyone, fueled by data-sharing, innovation.

The plan was to disrupt an entire industry. But it required a partner, and technology, ready to take on many world’s-first challenges. For starters, electric racing requires a new way of thinking about the car. Speed, acceleration, and torque now depend on the battery. And braking is no longer just a way to hit the right speed for the turn—but a multi-dimensional system for generating power, changing race dynamics, and recharging the battery.

A co-pilot worthy of the name

To meet ambition with ambition, ERA combed the market looking for a clear way to gain pole position. With every possible option on the table, ERA chose Software AG and the Cumulocity IoT Platform both in the cloud and on the thin edge.

From vision to technology

With a Cumulocity IoT Thin Edge device installed behind the carbon-fiber driver’s seat of the F110e, the sky is the limit when it comes to the data possibilities. The car communicates with the cloud via 4G—a robust link to the Cumulocity IoT Platform—continuously streaming data about speed, acceleration, torque, RPMs, temperature, power from regenerative braking, and a whole lot more.  

 

 
 

Super connectivity with the Super iPaaS

Racing into the new era of Super iPaaS

To connect the F110e, and enable a democratized, green future for racing, ERA chose a new type of integration platform: Super iPaaS.

Software AG’s Super iPaaS is the only platform on the market that can integrate anything, anywhere, any way you want. Unlike a traditional iPaaS, a Super iPaaS integrates ERA’s entire enterprise.

Powered by webMethods.io and StreamSets, the Super iPaaS gives ERA access to a single pane of glass solution for APIs, Applications, Events, Data, and B2B—multi-cloud, accessible by IT and business users alike, with unlimited reach, and unified oversight.

Car-to-Cloud Integration

ERA’s solution literally integrates everything from car to cloud. Onboard, an embedded Asus PV100A in-vehicle edge gateway touches all systems from the driver interface, to cameras, to sensors that measure torque to temperature and beyond.

A 3D-interactive display brings in the on-board data and integrates it with live weather information from OpenWeather, and live track data and coaching suggestions powered by AI through the ChatGPT API. Knowing the world from windspeed to humidity, the contours of the track, and how the F110e is performing—lets fans have a new way of experiencing the race, coaches and drivers can make smarter decisions, and the car’s systems align with driver input to safely accelerate through the next curve. And every curve after that.

For fans that new experience includes deeper access to everything from pitwalks, to a view of the driver experience, to AI feedback on driver performance. For organizers, a Square Space web shop means agile merchandizing and sales, and a driver booking system means better allocation of people and resources. For drivers, generative AI provides a new level of racing insight, and new flexibility to make critical decisions as weather, car, and competitor data changes by the millisecond.  

 

 
Connected racing
 

AI-enabled, real-time driver and fan experience

For ERA drivers to make the best decisions, they need access to the best information. Much of this starts with deep insights pulled from the car’s CAN bus—a system that allows a car’s electronic units and devices to communicate—collected by an edge controller running on Cumulocity IoT Thin Edge. Data gets sent to the Cumulocity IoT Platform in real-time, so drivers can make better decisions based on everything from motor heat to predicted track humidity—without having to correlate complex patterns on their own since the system does the heavy lifting with the help of machine learning and AI.
 
 "This is monumental. Previously, in most motorsport classes, data could only be accessed after the race was over. Only Formula 1-class racing has been up to transmitting data in real time—and this comes at a phenomenal expense.”
- Dieter Vanswijgenhoven, ERA’s Co-Founder, Business & Technical Director
 

Things get even more interesting by building a digital twin of the car and correlating its data with external sources. For example, driver lap times can be analyzed against numerous factors, including weather, or tire wear, and then run through the webMethods ChatGPT connector to enable AI-driver coaching.

Fans win, too, thanks to AI-enablement. Imagine a virtual, 3D-environment, where you can sit in the car and experience a race, or virtual access to the pit so you can feel the heat of the moment at the center of all the action. This is Dieter’s vision and with the help of the Super iPaaS it’s not far from becoming a reality. ERA will provide the first truly immersive fan experience in racing—a revolution to the one-way passivity of television.

And when fans want to know more about the track, driver, car, or anything else—they just have to ask. Through the integration of the ChatGPT API, this is now available to answer any complex questions fans have in natural human language.  

 

Painting the racetrack green with IoT

The impact of Cumulocity IoT goes far beyond any single race or car. Unleashed, live data is attracting startups, and inspiring innovation to turn all aspects of the racetrack green.

ERA will ultimately enable a testing environment for sustainable initiatives like recycled part prototyping and a plastic-free paddock. The ecosystem that grows around a green racetrack will go even further, including scholarships to include young and more diverse drivers, and innovations for adaptive EVs (Electric Vehicles) to suit a full range of bodies and needs.

Data integrated everywhere means organizers can implement requirements related to minimizing tire and brake usage for instance—limiting particle release, and directly saving energy—powering cars using sustainable sources, and potentially helping shape consumer EV industry building and operating standards.

Thanks to ERA’s leading role, the use of streaming data will continue racing’s long history of helping transition safety and health innovations from closed tracks to the open roads we all depend on for day-to-day life. The same intelligence that helps ERA cars save energy without sacrificing performance today may power your own EV tomorrow. 

 

 
 

Multi-cloud, multi-vendor flexibility

ERA chose Cumulocity IoT in part because of its truly multi-cloud, vendor agnostic approach. Using Cumulocity IoT hosted on AWS gave ERA the keys to start building apps that combine short-term operational data from Cumulocity with long-term data from an AWS data lake.

And since the IoT platform is multi-cloud, like the Super iPaaS itself, ERA retains the flexibility to work with any vendor, anywhere, at any time. So, while Cumulocity IoT enables apps built around data in AWS or anywhere else, ERA can also work with Square Space for merchandizing the fan experience and deeper B2B integration.

But this is just the beginning. As new cloud-based services, apps, and APIs emerge, ERA knows it won’t be held back or locked in. It can pivot to systems that work best for its drivers, coaches, and fans as their particular needs and desires change over time.

For instance, when ERA wanted to implement live video feeds for coaches and fans it was able to integrate GoPro® cameras with its cloud-based system—up, running, and viewable—in less than a day. 

"We can innovate overnight if we want to. We have all the parameters in place.”

- Beth Georgiou, Sporting Director ERA
 
As we are both the developers and builders of the cars, and also run the championship the cars drive in, means we can outpace anyone with integrating transformative technologies. No political hoops or technical restraints to being the most technologically advance racing series out there. For this you need partners that are able to keep pace, and this is why we work with Software AG!
 
 
iPaaS-ing the competition on the racetrack with integration
 
The ERA Racing Championship is disrupting an entire industry and transforming motorsports by integrating everything. Explore their innovative approach to integration in this interactive infographic.
 
 

Driving Change

ERA is changing motorsports forever. It’s IoT platform, with deep Super iPaaS integration, is the digital backbone attracting startups that aren’t just transforming the cars—but the services in and around the entire racing industry.

It starts with the unrestrained thrill that only electric racing can provide: instant, full-throttle torque off the line. It continues with a fully connected experience, powered by AI-enablement, streaming data, and awesome live analysis.  It changes the world thanks to a thriving ecosystem pushing the boundaries of sustainability so that everyone can truly embrace the experience.

This is the new ERA in motorsports.  

 

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
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Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
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Chief Information Officer
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Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
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Global IT Director
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Dirk De Bevere
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Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
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Chief Digital & Information Officer
Bekaert
Thomas Kessler
Thomas Kessler
Partner | CIO Programme Leader
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Emmanuel Gob
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DPD
pascal pauwels
Pascal Pauwels
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Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
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Benoît Dewaele
Group IT Directo
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Dirk Deridder-1
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CTO - Technology Services & Practices
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Thierry Driesens
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Koen Vandaele
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Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
Kyndryl BeLux
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Steven Vermeulen
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Jack Hamande
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Director General Digital Transformation
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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
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Executive Advisor
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Dean
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Marleen Thorré
Head of Digital EMEA
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Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
Mercedes-Benz Europe
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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
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
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!