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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

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

iPaaS breathes new life into Portugal-based insurer Gamalife

With EUR 9.4bn in assets, Gamalife is one of the top three life insurance companies in Portugal. It recently entered the Italian market with the acquisition of a large portfolio of almost 200,000 new customers.

Challenges
  • 20-year-old legacy banking systems slow down innovation and Open Banking initiatives
  • Mainframe built on RPG (Report Programming Generator) doesn’t meet modern integration requirements
  • Need to gain a unified view of data & records stored across the company
  • Pressure to reduce time to market in a highly competitive industry
  • Ambition to leverage an API-driven ecosystem to create new business channels while securely sharing data with third parties

Outcomes
  • Introduced an open, agnostic enterprise-grade integration platform
  • Modernized API ecosystem with full lifecycle API management platform
  • Deployed powerful MFT solution to boost productivity and end-user experience
  • Ensured compliance with strong personal data and security governance layer
  • Increased productivity and customer value with automated document creation

 
 
 “We chose our integration platform with a specific future goal in mind: to expose our services via APIs and enable real-time communication with the appropriate MFT (Managed File Transfer) software. At the moment we are already seeing significant benefits. We have much greater flexibility in building integrations between our systems, and between our system and those of our partners. We have already been able to implement some solutions and automations quickly, simply, and effectively, which was not possible before.”
- Rui Pinto - Head of IT, Gamalife

 

A single integration solution
 

Gamalife is a leading life insurance company in Portugal. Its decades-old integration infrastructure—inherited from the traditional bank which originally owned it—was no longer fit for purpose. Data was held in silos across the organization, core data was locked into a legacy platform and there were security issues with exposing data securely to third parties.

“Our core legacy platform as programmed on RPG and wasn’t up to the sort of modern integration we needed,” says Rui Pinto, Head of IT at Gamalife. “My team and I were getting more and more worried about vulnerabilities, not to mention the need to future-proof access to data in an ecosystem economy. It was time to act.”

The company needed a flexible integration platform as a service (iPaaS) combined with a Managed File Transfer capability and API management so they could securely expose data to partners and distributors. This would help them offer new solutions in the digital distribution of insurance as a service.

Furthermore, the solution had to be compliant with the demanding requirements of a heavily regulated financial sector. It was vital the company could maintain a complete overview of every communication and call made and received, as well as a record of all requests, both internal and external.

The value of experience

After talking to competitors, Gamalife chose a solution from Software AG’s local partner Findmore Digital, who recommended a solution based on webMethods.

“We selected Software AG and Findmore Digital because they had recently completed a similar project with a carve-out from the same bank we did—a non-life insurance company here in Portugal,” says Rui, “and we knew the results had been spectacular.”

The partner, supplier and customer got down to work. All the integrations between internal applications and between the company and our partners were transformed, without the need to touch the applications. This allowed us to make this evolution faster, safer and with less impact. As Rui explains, this offers his security team a significant advantage: “The architecture of the webMethods platform helps isolate specific areas to prevent breaches, and all communication is from inside to outside. That gives security a better view of traffic and makes it easier for us to expose our data securely.”

Everything they wanted. And more.

Gamalife's new webMethods.io Integration Platform is now up and running, providing services for all types of use, internal and external, streamlining the business and increasing the possibilities for the future evolution of the other platforms. And, as Rui says, the investment is proving to be even more valuable than the company considered at the start of the project. See what the company is doing with its new MFT solution:

“We anticipated three or four use cases for webMethods ActiveTransfer, but we soon saw it had so much more potential than we realized to increase the flow of data within our company, and with it the quality of services we offer. For example, we used to use a third-party service provider for customer statements and other documents, which involved generating and sending them thousands of .xml files every month. But now that whole process is automated.“

And while Gamalife is already reaping the rewards of its investment, things are set to really take off in the next phase.

This is just the beginning

"webMethods is based on open standards and has a thriving Developer Portal, so we're excited about what's to come," says Rui. "We're looking to develop new services so that our partners, in this case distributors, can serve our customers with more features and offer a better experience. The aim is to be ever closer to the customer."

Gamalife’s data is comprehensively protected by webMethods API management, a robust solution for managing their API portfolio. As well as offering rate limiting and gateway access policies to protect API resources, it gives the company advanced analytics to enforce authorization and security by using OAuth and other authentication methods, together with modern encryption standards. Traffic monitoring optimizes run-time performance conditions, enforces limits for service invocations, and sends alerts whenever conditions are violated. In addition, it makes it easy to conduct penetration tests to check for vulnerabilities.

“The whole process has been very smooth so far, and there have been no delays,” says Rui. “Believe me, that’s very rare. We worked together as a single team, and I’m confident Software AG and Findmore will be able to deliver this important next phase.”

 

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
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Bahadir Samli
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CIO
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Vice President & Head of IT
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Group CIO
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Chief Information Officer
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Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
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Thomas Kessler
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Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
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Thierry Driesens
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Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
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Director General Digital Transformation
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Tom Tomczak
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Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
NRB
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Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
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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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Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
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Team

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Luc Hendrikx
CEO
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Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
Hendrik Deckers
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Founder - MD
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Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
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Program Manager
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Shelly Deracourt
Program Manager
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Charlotte Coen
Partner Success Manager
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Ivana Bradvica
Junior Event Manager
ML B-W-1
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Financial Controller
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Vlera Berisha
Junior Community Manager
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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!