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Belgium 10-3-26 All Members Physical english

The Composable Enterprise: Engineered with AI

From modular business design to AI-driven pipelines, architectures, and operationsA composable enterprise is built on modular processes, API-driven ecosystems, low-code platforms, and cloud-native services. It promises speed and adaptability by allowing organisations to reconfigure their capabilities as conditions change. However, modular design alone does not guarantee resilience; the way these systems are engineered and operated is just as important.This is where AI is beginning to make a difference. Beyond generating snippets of code, AI is already influencing how entire systems are developed and run: accelerating CI/CD pipelines, improving test coverage, optimising Infrastructure-as-Code, sharpening observability, and even shaping architectural decisions. These changes directly affect how quickly new business components can be deployed, connected, and retired.In this session, we will examine how CIOs can bring these two movements together:Composable design is the framework for flexibility and modularity.AI-augmented engineering is the force that delivers the speed, quality, and intelligence needed to sustain it.The pitfalls of treating them in isolation: composability that collapses under slow engineering cycles, or AI that only adds complexity without a modular structure.The discussion goes beyond concepts to practical implications: how to architect organisations that can be recomposed at speed, without losing control or reliability. The outcome is an enterprise that is not only modular in design but also engineered to adapt continuously under real-world conditions.

Belgium 12-3-26 Physical english

The Third-Party Risk Reckoning: How far can you trust your vendors?

Tomato! Tomato! Tomato! Get your tomato now! Every vendor sells security. And every company depends on vendors, partners, and suppliers. The more digital the business becomes, the longer that list grows, and so does the attack surface. One weak link, and there is always one, or one missed update, and trust collapses faster than any firewall can react. What used to be a procurement checklist has become a full-time discipline. Questionnaires, audits, and endless documentation prove that everyone’s “compliant,” yet incidents keep happening. So it’s clear: the issue isn’t lack of policy, or maybe a bit, but mostly lack of visibility. Beyond a certain point, even the most secure organisation is only as safe as its least prepared partner (or an employee who hadn’t had their morning coffee). So how far can you trust your vendors? How do you check what you can’t control? And when does assurance become theatre instead of protection? Does it come at a different cost? Let’s exchange what works and what fails in third-party risk management: live monitoring, shared responsibility models, contractual levers, and the reality of building trust in a chain you don’t own. A closed conversation for those redefining what partnership means when risk is shared but accountability isn’t.

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.

March 12, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

The Third-Party Risk Reckoning: How far can you trust your vendors?

March 24, 2026 Squad Session 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.

March 26, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical 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.

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Achieving performance and order management excellence during Black Friday with full-stack observability

IBM Sterling OMS Crushes Black Friday with Instana: 120% Order Spike, No Sweat Challenge: Maintain peak performance for IBM Sterling Order Management (OMS) during Black Friday, when clients see a 20-30x order volume increase. Solution: Implement IBM Instana Observability for real-time monitoring and proactive issue resolution. Results: - Processed 15 billion API calls in one week (120% YoY increase) with sub-second response times. - Achieved 99.9999% uptime, exceeding SLAs. - Improved user experience with intuitive dashboards and alerts. This case study highlights how IBM Instana empowered IBM Sterling OMS to deliver a smooth Black Friday experience for clients amidst a massive order surge.

When it is Black Friday and many of the world’s top retailers rely on your solution to conduct their business, your solution better perform. During the 2023 holiday season, the IBM Sterling® Order Management software (OMS) team used the IBM Instana® Observability solution to maintain excellent performance and help smash order and revenue records.

The SaaS version of IBM Sterling OMS facilitates real-time order and inventory management for many brands that are household names in the US and internationally, from massive online marketplaces to popular shops for fashion apparel and children’s gifts. For these companies, if the OMS system falters, even for a minute, it is money lost; during Black Friday or other seasonal peaks, it could be millions.

The Sterling OMS team at IBM understands what is at stake, and it commits to a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.9999% uptime for customers. But making good on this SLA is no simple task.

IBM Sterling OMS SaaS technology stack

Database components: IBM® Db2®, NoSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elastic Search
Messaging: IBM MQ, Kafka
Software defined networking (SDN): istio Service Mesh
Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop to support AI workloads
20+ IBM Cloud® Kubernetes Service clusters, 900+ worker nodes, 60,000 active containers
Coming soon: Large Language Model (LLM) AI use cases to enhance services for call centers

The SaaS OMS solution hosts more than 300 client environments and integrates them with a diverse technology stack. “Each customer environment is both complex and unique,” says Pradeep Nanjundaswamy, Director of Order Management Development at IBM. “For any implementation, there is a minimum of around 20 integrations with external systems such as payment systems, ERP and delivery services.” Monitoring performance across the whole heterogeneous stack is a must; each component is critical to overall high availability.

15B

API calls in one week

Sub-seconds

Average response time

“

It was the first year we faced the holiday season with Instana as the monitoring system. We had 15 billion API calls in 2023 without experiencing severity one incidents or escalations. Overall, it was smooth. ”

Pradeep NanjundaswamyDirector of Order Management DevelopmentIBM

Visibility that simplifies complexity

Earlier in 2023, the Sterling OMS team had replaced its previous, third-party performance-monitoring solution with IBM Instana Observability.

Black Friday would be the first seasonal surge for the new setup. But from the time they began testing Instana, the OMS team saw advantages they knew would serve them well during the holidays. “The previous solution required many custom integrations that we have been able to replace with out-of-the-box integrations from Instana,” says Shoeb Bihari, Technical Lead / Site Reliability Engineer Advisor on the Sterling team.

The user interface is also better now. “With the other solution, we had to embed its screens into our self-service tool,” explains Nanjundaswamy. “With Instana we rewrote the user screens leveraging Instana APIs, and the user experience has greatly improved.”

The OMS support team now uses Instana to monitor system health and performance in real time and intervene according to the SLAs. “We have browser-based monitoring, covering the application level and infrastructure,” says Dinup Pillai, Senior Technical Staff Member on the Sterling team. This includes synthetic monitoring (also known as active monitoring), which simulates end-user actions from different locations and continually monitors availability and response time. “When any performance issues arise, automated alerts help minimize response time,” says Pillai.

The team also takes advantage of Instana’s flexibility to create personalized dashboards and alerts for API-level and business-level metrics. They can provide role-based visibility to client and internal personnel. Clients get real-time views of business performance, including order volumes and capture rates.

Black Friday? No problem.

When Black Friday arrived, clients’ order volumes exploded by 20-30 times their normal rates for a solid week. In 2022, over 6 billion API calls¹ hit the OMS system during Thanksgiving week. A year later, there were about 15 billion API calls—an increase of 120% over the previous year.

So, how did the system do?

Most of the API calls had a response time in sub-seconds. “It was the first year we faced the holiday season with Instana as the monitoring system,” says Nanjundaswamy. “We had 15 billion API calls in 2023 without experiencing severity one incidents or escalations. Overall, it was smooth.”

About IBM Sterling Order Management team

IBM Sterling solutions and offerings provide proven reliable connectivity, end-to-end visibility, real-time insights to turn potential disruptions into opportunities for customer engagement, growth and profit. The solutions include supply chain sustainability software like IBM Sterling Order Management, an order fulfillment software that manages and optimizes processes across channels and fulfillment centers in real time.

Solution components

IBM Sterling® Order Management IBM Instana® Observability

Technologies

IBM Instana Observability IBM Sterling Order Management platform

Partners

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