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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

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Belgium 27-8-26 AB Members Physical english

Summer Festival: Advisory Board

CIO agendas are crowded: cost pressure, cyber, regulation, talent, data, AI, vendor dependency, business expectations. Most organisations are trying to do too much at once, and the “must-do” work often blocks the strategic work. CIONET only creates value if its agenda matches what CIOs truly need, in the right format, at the right time. The challenge Pick the few priorities that matter most for 2027, then translate them into a clear CIONET agenda. Outcome we leave with A ranked CIO agenda for 2027, and a directly aligned CIONET programme outline (themes, formats, cadence), with a shortlist of speaker and case targets.

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Belgium 27-8-26 Country Members Physical english

Summerfest: From Story to Habit

How to align people, shift routines, and prove value Technology transformations often fail not because the tools don’t work, but because people don’t change their work habits. Boards want proof of value, executives want business outcomes, IT wants clarity, and employees want ease. Between these expectations, the CIO’s role is no longer just to deliver platforms; it is to tell the story that motivates people and turn that story into daily habits. This session will explore: The narrative: how to craft a simple, repeatable story that explains the “why” behind change for every stakeholder. From story to routine: practical ways to embed new behaviours through manager rituals, team incentives, and visible leadership. Reskilling and new expectations: preparing teams for evolving roles, from cross-department collaboration to AI-enhanced workflows. Measuring what matters: showing progress in speed, quality, and resilience — not just in licences bought or trainings completed. The aim is to equip CIOs with a leadership toolkit: a story that unites, habits that endure, and proof that convinces even the toughest boardroom.

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Belgium 8-9-26 Invitation Only Virtual english

What an AI Architect Actually Does in Practice; Skills, responsibilities, interfaces, and career moves behind one of the most misunderstood emerging roles.

The AI architect role is becoming more visible, and the scope varies across organisations. The challenge is defining what the role owns, where it sits, and how it works with existing architecture, data, security, risk, and business teams. Three pressure points need clarity. - Role definition matters because the position can span solution architecture, data architecture, governance, integration, security, vendor selection, and business process design. - Interfaces matter because the role must connect teams while respecting existing responsibilities. - Skills matter because technical depth needs to be combined with judgement around controls, delivery choices, and operational boundaries. The working question is simple: how do we define the AI architect role so it becomes useful, credible, and connected to delivery? If this role is emerging in your organisation, let’s compare how others are defining it and where they are placing it.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 

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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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
Geert Goethals
CIO
Sibelga
Bahadir Samli
Bahadir Samli
CIO
ING Belgique
2-Feb-29-2024-11-35-00-9309-AM
Bart Kerkhofs
Director Digital Technology
Tata Steel Nederland
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Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
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1-Feb-29-2024-11-34-59-8990-AM
Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
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Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
Johnson & Johnson
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Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
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Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
Red Hat
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Kevin Ledegen
Group IT director
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Chief Digital & Information Officer
Bekaert
Thomas Kessler
Thomas Kessler
Partner | CIO Programme Leader
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DPD
pascal pauwels
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Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
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Dirk Deridder-1
Dirk Deridder
CTO - Technology Services & Practices
SMALS
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Koen Vandaele
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Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
Kyndryl BeLux
steven-vermeulen
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Jack Hamande
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Director General Digital Transformation
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Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
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Chief Technology & Transformation Officer
Krëfel
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Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
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Jeroen Verbruggen
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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
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
Vlera Berishaa (1)
Vlera Berisha
Community Manager
Stanislav Mosan
Stanislav Mosan
Financial Director

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