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Belgium 19-3-26 Country Members Physical french

Vendor Detox: La consolidation vaut-elle le risque ?

Moins de Partenaires : La consolidation vaut-elle le risque ? Le problème est la prolifération des fournisseurs : trop d'outils causant de la complexité, une taxe d'intégration paralysante et de la redondance. La Taxe d'Intégration est le coût caché (en temps, en échecs et en ressources) d'essayer de faire fonctionner ensemble des systèmes disparates. Cet échange se concentre sur des stratégies éprouvées pour simplifier de manière agressive le parc technologique, consolider les fournisseurs et élever certains fournisseurs clés au rang de partenaires stratégiques.

Belgium 24-3-26 Invitation Only Physical english

Killing Zombie Projects: Knowing when to stop, restart, or quietly let go

Every organisation has them, projects that keep running long after their purpose has faded. No one remembers who asked for them, but shutting them down feels riskier than keeping them alive. And eventually, people stay assigned, budgets stay allocated, and energy drains into work that no longer matters. Inertia at its finest. Ending a project is rarely a technical decision. It’s emotional, political, and often tied to past promises or personal reputation. The longer something runs, the harder it becomes to admit it’s time to stop. Yet clearing that backlog of half-dead initiatives is often the only way to make room for new ones. So how do you decide when to pull the plug? What signals show that value is gone, and who gets to say so? How can governance encourage honest calls without punishing those who make them? Let’s discuss how to end gracefully, refocus teams, and turn closure into confidence rather than blame. Bullet in the head? Is that how you kill a zombie, or was it a silver bullet in the heart? A closed conversation on how to make progress by learning to stop.

Belgium 26-3-26 Invitation Only Virtual english

Measuring Value in AI Initiatives: Defining ROI, accountability, and measurable outcomes in complex environments

AI projects continue to multiply, but proving their value remains difficult. Most organisations can track activity, not impact. Dashboards count pilots and models, yet few translate to measurable business outcomes. The result is familiar: success stories without clarity on what they actually delivered. The real issue is measurement. Traditional ROI metrics fail when AI changes decisions more than results. Financial indicators miss the operational gains, while qualitative benefits often sound too vague to defend. Without clear evidence, budgets come under scrutiny and confidence erodes. This session focuses on how to connect AI work with business outcomes through structured metrics, governance, and accountability. We’ll explore how value tracking evolves from experimentation to scale, which indicators earn trust at board level, and where measurement stops being meaningful. A closed exchange for comparing methods, tools, and lessons learned in defining, proving, and sustaining AI impact.

March 24, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Killing Zombie Projects: Knowing when to stop, restart, or quietly let go

March 26, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Measuring Value in AI Initiatives: Defining ROI, accountability, and measurable outcomes in complex environments

March 31, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Composability in Practice: Building modular systems that stay coherent as they grow

Composability sounds elegant in theory: small, independent parts that come together to form something greater, but in practice, it’s messy. What happens when modules overlap, APIs evolve differently across domains, and governance struggles to keep pace? What was meant to simplify architecture sometimes ends up multiplying it.

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Airbnb Optimizes Usage and Costs by Using Savings Plans and Actionable Cost Data on AWS

To help it achieve its goals, Airbnb looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud provider, for data and infrastructure solutions. Using support from AWS and multiple AWS services, Airbnb developed strategies to manage capacity, optimize storage and compute capacity, and build a custom cost and usage data tool. The solutions help Airbnb reduce costs, deliver actionable business metrics, and pursue data-informed efficiency projects across its teams.

Opportunity | Architecting Cost Efficiency to Grow Sustainably

Airbnb’s journey to facilitating connection and community through travel began in 2007 when its first two hosts—and founders—welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home. Since then, the company’s hosts have welcomed over one billion total guest arrivals, with listings across more than 220 countries and regions.

From its early days as a company, Airbnb has powered its business using cloud services from AWS—a strategy that supports its rapidly expanding workloads as well as its need for agile compute and storage solutions. The company decided to invest in transforming its data and usage strategy on AWS. Because Airbnb operations involve hundreds of services and an agile technical culture, the company needed a strategic, centralized, and relatively frictionless approach to leaner purchasing.

Early in Airbnb’s journey, the company used a cost allocation visualization engine, AWS Cost Explorer, which has an easy-to-use interface that helps customers visualize, understand, and manage their AWS costs and usage over time. Later, to make use of its internal data infrastructure and extend the cost visualization capabilities of its data warehousing stack, Airbnb took advantage of data from the AWS Cost & Usage Report, which contains a comprehensive set of AWS cost and usage data and is available at an hourly, daily, or monthly level of granularity, as well as at the management or member account level.

"Using Savings Plans has been a significant improvement to Airbnb’s cloud management process. It’s helped reduce our operational workload while also driving meaningful cost savings for our business.”

Ari Siegel
Senior Finance Manager, Airbnb

Solution | Driving Cost Efficiency Using Insights and Pricing Solutions

Relying on its data warehouse, Airbnb uses the AWS Cost & Usage Report to run a custom pipeline that produces a dynamic view of Airbnb’s cost data and facilitates analytics. Airbnb’s pipeline ingests cost and usage files from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. To process files, Airbnb uses Amazon EMR, a cloud big data environment for processing vast amounts of data using open-source tools, making it possible for developers to run big data applications and petabyte-scale data analytics faster. Airbnb uses its pipeline to discount and amortize the data and then further customize it to support analytics and produce actionable insights and metrics.

To save on its use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, Airbnb became an early adopter of Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model offering lower prices compared to Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances in exchange for a specific usage commitment. Airbnb migrated its Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances to Savings Plans and discontinued its On-Demand Instance usage, resulting in cost savings. “Using Savings Plans has been a significant improvement to Airbnb’s cloud management process. It’s helped reduce our operational workload while also driving meaningful cost savings for our business,” says Ari Siegel, senior finance manager at Airbnb.

Airbnb also manages and saves on storage costs using Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering (S3 Intelligent-Tiering), a cloud storage class that delivers automatic cost savings by moving objects between four access tiers when access patterns change. By using S3 Intelligent-Tiering to manage storage locations for objects used by Airbnb’s data warehouse, Airbnb reduced storage costs by approximately 27 percent. Additionally, for replicated data stored for backup, the company uses Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes—a range of storage classes that users can choose from based on the data access, resiliency, and cost requirements of their workloads. Airbnb relies on the AWS Cost & Usage Report for hourly insights into data storage spending on Amazon S3.

Airbnb also manages costs within its logging infrastructure using Amazon OpenSearch Service, which makes it easy to perform interactive log analytics, near-real-time application monitoring, website searches, and more. To help lower costs, Airbnb employed UltraWarm storage for Amazon OpenSearch Service, which provides a cost-effective way to store large amounts of read-only data on Amazon OpenSearch Service. The solution contributed to a 60 percent reduction in Airbnb’s Amazon OpenSearch Service costs.

Outcome | Maturing Operations and Empowering Teams

Airbnb’s finance and technology teams employed a broad range of AWS resources to build cloud efficiency and optimize operations. To work toward data-driven purchasing, the teams also expanded their consultation and engagement using AWS. And by delivering process and visibility improvements, the company helped empower individuals and teams to adopt cost management goals.

Technologies

AWS Cost & Usage Report (CUR)

Partners

CIONET Business Circles

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?

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.

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 !

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.