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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

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Upcoming Events

 
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Belgium 21-4-26 Invitation Only Physical english

From Victim to Victor: Cyber resilience is a means, providing Business Continuity the goal

In an era where every outage, audit, and cyberattack is a test of organisational survival, resilience has become the new currency of trust. While traditional perimeter security with: firewalls, intrusion detection, and scanners, remains essential, it is no longer a sufficient guarantee against modern threats that bypass these layers to penetrate your core systems. Today, enterprises require security and continuity that are built-in, not bolted-on. This CIONET roundtable focuses on the shift from reactive disaster recovery to proactive Business Continuity. Together with experts from HPE Zerto, we will explore how organisations can transform their recovery strategies into seamless continuity models.

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Belgium 23-4-26 Country Members Physical & Virtual english

CIOFEST BELGIUM: Leadership in the Agentic Era

AI is no longer confined to supporting human tasks. We are entering the agentic era, where autonomous systems act on behalf of people and organisations. These agents can gather information, make decisions, negotiate terms, and even complete transactions. The implications extend well beyond technology; they touch the very foundations of business models, governance, and leadership. For CIOs and their peers, the rise of “machine customers” and autonomous partners poses new questions: Market impact: How do you compete and create value when some customers and suppliers are machines? Governance: What trust, compliance, and accountability structures are needed when AI acts independently in financial, procurement, or customer-facing processes? Leadership: How should CIOs guide their organisations in redefining roles, responsibilities, and decision-making when agents take over parts of the value chain?Business strategy: What opportunities emerge for new revenue models, platforms, and ecosystems shaped by autonomous interaction? This session shifts the focus from the mechanics of AI agents to the decisions that will shape leadership in the next decade. It is a call for CIOs to prepare for a future where relationships, markets, and strategies are no longer limited to human-to-human interactions, but also extend to human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions.

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Belgium 29-4-26 Invitation Only Physical english

Building Future-Ready Application Ecosystems in the Age of Intelligent Automation

This CIONET workshop is a collaborative deep-dive into the practicalities of"rewiring the building" while it’s still occupied. Drawing onKyndryl’s deep heritage in mission-critical infrastructure and their latestresearch, we will dismantle the "hidden costs" of legacyenvironments. The conversation will focus on the transition from static,monolithic structures to composable architectures that allow intelligent agentsto operate seamlessly across hybrid landscapes.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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April 2, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

Taming the SaaS Sprawl: Tracking spend, ownership, and usage before it slips out of control

SaaS gave business units freedom: quick onboarding, no infrastructure, and instant results. But over time, that freedom turned into fragmentation. Each team now buys, renews, and configures its own stack. HR has one platform, finance has another, and marketing probably has ten. The invoices keep coming, usage keeps dropping, and no one is sure who’s accountable for what.

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May 12, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Product-Centric IT 2.0: Blending product and project thinking

Everyone says they’ve gone product-centric. In reality, most organisations live in a hybrid world where projects, products, and platforms overlap. Teams manage releases while still chasing deadlines, and governance still thinks in milestones rather than outcomes. The shift is underway, but the mindset hasn’t caught up.

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May 19, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

AI vs AI in Cybersecurity: When defenders and attackers both use AI

The game has changed, clearly. Attackers have AI, defenders have AI, and both sides are learning faster than anyone expected, or maybe the attackers are just a bit faster. What used to take hours now happens in seconds, and detection windows close before alerts even appear. It’s adaptation beyond automation, and no one gets to sit still.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

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Mindgate partners for scalability, reliability, and growth

As India's UPI transactions soar, Mindgate Solutions, a Mumbai-based leader in payment technology, needed to modernize its core UPI solution. Shifting from a monolithic system, they've chosen Red Hat OpenShift to build a robust and scalable microservices architecture. This, coupled with a CI/CD pipeline, promises agility and efficiency. Their Red Hat ISV partnership grants access to expert guidance and fuels future growth.

Benefits: 

  • Managed growth thanks to a solid partnership and robust technology
  • Assured stability, performance, and scalability of the business-critical UPI platform
  • Established a CI/CD pipeline for rapid change
 
 

Leading digital payments in and beyond India

Established in 2008 by 2 entrepreneurs passionate about digital payments, Mindgate Solutions (Mindgate) has been at the forefront of the digital payments revolution in India from its inception. Today, it remains a key player in payments technology and transaction processing in India. “India is a pioneer in real-time payments,” said Guhan Muthusamy, Co-Founder and Head of Products at Mindgate. “The industry is poised to grow 4 to 5 times in the next 24 months as more countries adopt real-time payment ecosystems.” Beyond India, Mindgate also has a presence across the globe, most notably in the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. 

Mindgate’s solutions include everything from new-generation corporate transaction banking to mobile-based collections. Its UPI solution integrates with payment platforms, such as the UPI instant real-time payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). On a monthly average, UPI facilitates more than 8 billion inter-bank transactions. Today, Mindgate handles close to 70% of UPI transactions through its partner banks. 

From day 1, Mindgate built its UPI solution on open source technology. “Our UPI solution started as a monolithic application with a Spring architecture,” said Muthusamy. “We were able to handle around 16 million transactions per day but expect UPI transactions to grow 5-fold in the next couple of years driven by in-app payments in social media apps; we needed a larger-scale solution.”

 
 

Partnering with a pioneer in the open source world

“Open source provides tremendous convenience and flexibility,” said Muthusamy. According to Muthusamy, today’s banks believe in open source and want a stable partner to support it. 

“Red Hat is a pioneer in the open source world, particularly the enterprise space,” said Muthusamy. “Its enterprise experience with the large banks goes back a long way. Red Hat can help us and our customer bank implement open source in large enterprise settings.”

Red Hat was Mindgate’s first OEM partner. The partnership began a couple of years ago when Mindgate began looking for a highly scalable platform to support its UPI solution. For Mindgate, partnering with Red Hat offers a wide variety of benefits: platform scalability, a modern CI/CD pipeline, and innovation from OpenShift communities. “Mindgate’s partnership with Red Hat is a partnership for scalability, reliability, and growth,” said Muthusamy.

Online and classroom-led training from Red Hat has been a tremendous help for Mindgate, helping it address the immense challenge of meeting customer expectations and market requirements with the UPI solution. “Our team is now well-trained in best practices for high-scale solutions,” said Muthusamy. Team members completed the Red Hat OpenShift certification program early in the project, ensuring they had the right skills to build the proof-of-concept and carry out the load testing.

In addition to the training courses, access to Red Hat experts helped Mindgate’s team become more proficient while scaling the UPI solution. “Joining the Red Hat ISV Program gives us direct access to Red Hat engineers to learn about the platform and deployment and maintenance of applications running on Red Hat OpenShift,” said Nikhil Mahawar, VP of Product and Innovation at Mindgate.

 

Together, Red Hat and Mindgate can help the banking industry build a large-scale ecosystem for digital payments. Guhan Muthusamy - Co-Founder and Head of Products, Mindgate Solutions

 

We see a future with many more solutions and customers on Red Hat OpenShift. George Sam - Co-Founder and Head of Business, Mindgate Solutions

 

Building a robust and highly scalable foundation

Looking for a highly scalable platform for its UPI solution, Mindgate ran a proof-of-concept and load test across multiple market-leading platforms before choosing Red Hat OpenShift. “Red Hat OpenShift is a microservices-based container platform that allows us to scale with the real-time payments ecosystem,” said Muthusamy.

Red Hat technology also meets Mindgate’s expectations with its surrounding ecosystems and the tools it provides. “We saw that Red Hat OpenShift would be a very strategic product for us to align with,” said George Sam, Co-Founder and Head of Business at Mindgate. “We felt that Red Hat OpenShift was by far 1 of the best products available in the market, particularly with the support available.”

Mindgate moved its UPI platform from a traditional monolithic architecture to a more modern microservices-based architecture with the help of the Red Hat ISV Program. After all, creating the new digital payments world is critical to the future of Mindgate and the banks it supports. “Together, Red Hat and Mindgate can help the banking industry build a large-scale ecosystem for digital payments,” said Muthusamy. “Red Hat brings scalability, reliability, and sustainability.

The company has, to date, implemented Red Hat OpenShift on-premise on its clusters in India as well as in the UAE, Singapore, and the United States. Mindgate currently has 2 customers onboarded for its UPI solution, with many others in the pipeline. It also has new UPI use cases in the pipeline, including UPI on credit cards and offline UPI payments.

 
 

Partnering for growth, innovation, and a robust foundation

Managed growth thanks to solid partnership and foundation 

Mindgate’s story evolved from retail payments to retail payments supported by social media applications with its UPI solution, offered first in India and now in multiple geographies and countries. “Mindgate’s partnership with Red Hat and adoption of Red Hat OpenShift were our 2 most important milestones, helping us bring our new UPI initiative to market and expand our global reach,” said Rohit Sarwate, Alliance Lead at Mindgate. Maintaining its leadership position Mindgate is growing faster than the wider real-time payments ecosystem. 

To further growth, Mindgate is now building some other interesting new offerings with Red Hat, 1 being central bank digital currency (CBDC) and another corporate transaction banking. “Our partnership with Red Hat will help us grow,” said Muthusamy. “Red Hat OpenShift will provide a robust and scalable foundation as we expand our offerings.”

Assured stability, performance, and scalability of the business-critical UPI platform with tens of thousands of transactions per second 

Three of the biggest strengths of Mindgate’s UPI solution are the stability, high scalability, and performance brought by Red Hat OpenShift. “Red Hat helped us provide a robust, highly performant and highly scalable UPI solution that meets our customers’ needs and demands,” said Sarwate. 

One customer’s scalability test demonstrated that Mindgate’s UPI platform could support 10,000 transactions per second. “Feedback from customers has been very positive,” said Muthusamy. “The scalability is there, performance is there, user confidence is there, it supports a lot of open source ecosystems, and is made for the enterprise.”

Established CI/CD pipeline for meeting new market needs at pace 

With Mindgate anticipating more and more mandates around scalability and availability from India’s central regulatory authority, the Red Hat technology provides a robust infrastructure while establishing a CI/CD pipeline to accelerate time to market for changes. 

“As a company, Mindgate is dynamic and very responsive to the market’s needs. Our customers like it because they know we implement changes rapidly and apply accurate solutions that meet their needs,” said Muthusamy. “One of the biggest differences between leaders versus others in the UPI market today is platform scalability and the ability to respond very fast to new mandates.” 

With Mindgate’s reach expanding across the globe, Red Hat OpenShift is helping to ensure it always meets compliance requirements. “Every bank has a security checklist and guidelines that we need to meet, and Red Hat OpenShift is helping us to meet those checklists and best practices,” said Mahawar.

 
 

Banking on a robust 2-way partnership

Mindgate’s focus for the future is on expanding its payments from retail and social media to corporate and government and strengthening its central infrastructure for real-time payment ecosystems across geographies. And with many large banks considering moving to the public cloud, the opportunity of hybrid cloud provided by Red Hat OpenShift is phenomenal. “Our relationship with Red Hat is based on technology innovation in addition to the scalability of Red Hat OpenShift,” said Muthusamy. “This partnership means a lot to both of us.” 

The company sees Red Hat as a very strategic partner “Red Hat is collaborating with us, working with customers, and creating opportunities with Red Hat OpenShift,” said Sam. “We see a future with many more solutions and customers on Red Hat OpenShift.

Technologies

Red Hat OpenShift

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

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Cyber Circle

CIONET’s Cyber Circle: a new three-event programme exclusively focusing on the most urgent, complex, and high-impact challenges in cybersecurity today. Launched in 2026, this initiative brings together CISOs, CIOs, and senior IT executives with a strong interest in cybersecurity for three curated gatherings each year. As part of CIONET’s trusted executive community, the Cyber Circle provides a confidential, peer-driven environment to exchange insights, share real-world experiences, and address evolving cyber threats. Each session is designed to foster strategic dialogue, strengthen resilience, and elevate cybersecurity as a core driver of business value.

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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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Testimonials

Geert Goethals
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Programme Manager
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