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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

May 22, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Managing Vendor Lock-In: Balancing dependence, cost, and control in strategic partnerships

Every vendor swears their platform is open, flexible, and built for freedom. Then comes the renewal date. The price goes up, migration looks painful, and “strategic partnership” starts to feel more like dependency. Most organisations don’t get trapped overnight, they walk into it one contract at a time. Broadcom, anyone?

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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

CIONET Business Circles

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.

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.