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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 23-9-25 Squad Only Virtual english

Cybersecurity Without the Burnout ; Refocusing effort when alerts, threats, and pressure won’t stop

Security teams are overwhelmed. Too many tools. Too many alerts. Too few people. And now, increasing pressure from the board to protect everything, everywhere, all the time. Expect honest reflection, shared strategies, and a conversation that cuts through compliance noise and focuses on what to do when your team is stretched and your risk is rising.

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Belgium 23-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english

Reclaim the cloud : Powering Belgian Finance with Sovereignty

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, the financial services industry in Belgium faces a critical juncture regarding its cloud adoption strategy. While the allure of cloud computing – with its promise of scalability, agility, and innovation – is undeniable, the unique regulatory demands and paramount need for data sovereignty present significant challenges. This CIONET roundtable, aims to bring together Digital Leaders from the Belgian financial sector to discuss how to navigate these complexities. We will explore how financial institutions can leverage cloud technologies while ensuring complete control over their data, maintaining compliance with stringent European regulations like GDPR and DORA, and mitigating geopolitical risks.

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Belgium 24-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english

Bridging the Unbridgeable: IT Meets M(i)OT ; Converged infrastructures demand converged security

As smart devices proliferate across operational environments — from sensors on factory lines and GPS trackers in logistics fleets to wearables in healthcare and connected systems in smart cities — the integration of Managed IoT (MiOT) is accelerating. But with it comes a surge in cybersecurity risks. No longer isolated or air-gapped, OT systems are becoming fully networked, remotely accessible, and deeply entwined with IT. This creates a vulnerable, highly complex digital mesh, one where a single compromised device can trigger physical, financial, and reputational consequences.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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September 23, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english

Cybersecurity Without the Burnout ; Refocusing effort when alerts, threats, and pressure won’t stop

Security teams are overwhelmed. Too many tools. Too many alerts. Too few people. And now, increasing pressure from the board to protect everything, everywhere, all the time. Expect honest reflection, shared strategies, and a conversation that cuts through compliance noise and focuses on what to do when your team is stretched and your risk is rising.

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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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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

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Market leader TIM Group migrates to Red Hat OpenShift 4

TIM Group decided to migrate its existing Red Hat environment to Red Hat OpenShift 4. With help from a Red Hat, TIM successfully migrated critical business support system (BSS) applications with no downtime. The group can provision new container clusters in days. Cluster management and security is also easier and faster, with automated updates.

TIM Group uses Red Hat OpenShift 4 to support 100 million fixed and mobile lines

TIM Group is the leading information and communications technology (ICT) provider in Italy and Brazil and operates more than 100 million mobile and fixed lines. To take advantage of new management and data capabilities, TIM decided to migrate its existing Red Hat environment to Red Hat OpenShift 4. With help from a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), a dedicated expert and point of contact, TIM successfully migrated critical business support system (BSS) applications with no downtime. The group can now provision new container clusters in days, rather than months. Cluster management and security is also easier and faster, with automated updates that free staff to focus on more valuable projects.

Benefits:

  • Completed migration of critical business support system (BSS) applications  without outages or downtime
  • Reduced server provisioning times from months to days 
  • Simplified container cluster and platform management to free resources for more valuable projects
 

TIM Group updates and enhances back-end systems with Red Hat OpenShift 4

The TIM Group is the leading information and communications technology (ICT) group in Italy and Brazil. The group offers fixed, mobile, cloud and datacenter infrastructure, as well as communications and entertainment services for individuals, small and medium enterprises, large companies, private and public sector, and wholesale.TIM operates more than 100 million mobile and fixed lines across both countries.

More than four years ago, TIM implemented Red Hat OpenShift. Running in a virtualized datacenter environment, this architecture, with more than 1000 vCores, supports the transformation from monolithic application architectures to microservices applications for both front-end digital channels and back-end services, including the most critical for business.

To continue improving its service delivery, TIM sought to take advantage of new capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift 4—such as self-management and cluster automation—for many critical applications, but a complex environment risked business disruption during the upgrade. Each live application needed to be migrated across five environments: development, three testing environments, and production.

“We could see that these new technology capabilities would provide many benefits to our developer and customer experience,” said Alessandro Bertini, BSS Platform Group Technical Lead, TIM. “But we also needed to avoid any extended maintenance windows or unplanned downtime that could lead to downtime for our business support system.”

 

Working with a trusted technical expert to gain new container platform and management capabilities

TIM developers, architects, and application managers worked with the group’s Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) to assist with the complex migration and optimize the group’s container platform investment. Red Hat TAMs work with customers to provide ongoing, security-focused guidance, functioning as a single point of contact for insight from an extended team of Red Hat product and support experts. 

Together, TIM and its Red Hat TAM used Red Hat’s migration toolkit for containers to complete all migrations in just six months. This solution provides open source tools, including a web console and application programming interface (API) for migrating applications from the source cluster on Red Hat OpenShift 3 to a specified cluster on the latest Red Hat OpenShift release. 

The group runs its updated Red Hat OpenShift environment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, a lightweight operating system that provides the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux within the container platform.

“Our Red Hat TAM helped us plan the migration, with a breakdown of tasks and any prerequisites,” said Bertini. “He ensured any compatibility issues with legacy applications were resolved quickly. He’s involved in everything we do with our Red Hat OpenShift platform, and his support was critical to extending our team to complete the migration successfully.”

In addition to ongoing support from its Red Hat TAM, TIM also works closely with a Red Hat Customer Success Manager to orchestrate and monitor performance across its container environment. 

 

Speeding and simplifying container processes

Completed container platform migration without customer-facing outages

Using the migration toolkit for containers web console, TIM established an automated approach that standardized and simplified the migration process compared to a manual approach. After creating a replication repository, adding the source cluster, and establishing the migration plan, no further manual work is required, eliminating the risk of human error or inconsistent configuration that could create service downtime or outages.

“With the toolkit, every application was migrated in the exact same way and remained the same as much as possible,” said Bertini. “Our critical BSS applications continue to operate without any issues, so we can continue to offer reliable infrastructure and telecommunications services to our customers as we deliver new, valuable features.”

Reduced provisioning times from months to days

Instead of five environments, the group’s new Red Hat OpenShift 4 infrastructure comprises a single production cluster and a single testing cluster, each running in different virtual machines (VMs) for resilience. 

A simpler environment architecture, combined with a new operating system, has helped TIM reduce cluster provisioning time from months to days. TIM’s IT teams can now access a new cluster in 7-10 days, instead of 2.5 months.

“With Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, we no longer need to install lots of software on the virtual server each time we provision a new cluster,” said Bertini. “We can go straight from creating the final, approved container image to being ready to deploy to our production VM in a single step.” 

Simplified container cluster and platform management  

Management of TIM’s new container environment is also much more efficient, with automated, over-the-air updates for OpenShift. The OpenShift Update Service built-in feature automatically builds and notifies the operations team of updates based on recommended, tested paths. As a result, TIM can update an entire Red Hat OpenShift cluster, as well as its Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS deployment, in a single process.

Resilient, persistent software-defined storage based on Ceph® storage technology also helps TIM upgrade its Red Hat OpenShift clusters without affecting application performance. "We were happy to switch the storage technology from Gluster® to Ceph because the last one is a more robust and supported product. We are not using OpenShift Data Foundation." 

“Updating our OpenShift clusters with the OpenShift Update Service accelerates our ability to stay current with the latest features, bug fixes, and enhancements. It’s a much simpler process that helps us scale as needed to meet demand.”

With only about half as many staff needed to manage its OpenShift and Linux platforms, TIM has freed resources to focus on more valuable projects, such as analyzing the adoption of hybrid cloud environments or working to make new OpenShift features that are not currently used available for developers.

 

TIM continues to explore container technology possibilities

TIM’s software architect team is now exploring other features of its updated container platform, including Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, a component that provides a distributed microservice architecture, and Red Hat Quay, a container registry that helps customers build, analyze, distribute, and deploy container images. “In particular, we’d like to use Red Hat Quay to set up a process that uses a certified base to increase application security,” said Bertini.

The team is also running developer workshops to introduce the new Red Hat OpenShift 4 features and encourage their adoption.

“As more of our telco services move to an as-a-Service model, we are transforming our legacy application architecture to a microservices architecture,” said Bertini. ”Red Hat provides the robust yet easy to manage technology that we need to support this new approach.”

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
Bahadir Samli
CIO
ING Belgique
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Bart Kerkhofs
Vice President & Head of IT
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Group CIO
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Chief Information Officer
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Chief Digital & Information Officer
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Thomas Kessler
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pascal pauwels
Pascal Pauwels
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Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
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Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
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Directeur général
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Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
Partner - CEO
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Partner - CCO
1-Feb-08-2022-10-22-08-68-AM
Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
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Partner - Founder
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Tribes Sales Director Belgium
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Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
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Senior Programme Director
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Programme Manager
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Programme Manager
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Partner Success Manager
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Programme 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!