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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 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

20 Years CIONET - CIONET Belgium: Summer Festival

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership.Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.This is more than a celebration—it’s an opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and recharge with your fellow digital leaders. Don't miss this exclusive experience packed with inspiring talks, networking opportunities, and special recognitions that highlight the best of CIONET’s history and future.Let’s celebrate the past, present, and future of the digital community you helped build.

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Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership. Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.

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Belgium 2-9-25 All TRIBERS Virtual english

What Does It Cost to Host an App? ; A practical guide to calculating hosting costs across infra, licenses, and operations

You’ve been asked a simple question: “What does it cost to host this application?” But the answer is anything but simple. The platform sits across multiple data centres. The app spans a few VMs, shares a backup system, uses licensed monitoring, and touches five different teams. Your CMDB should help, but it’s rigid, outdated, or incomplete. And yet, you still need to provide a number, clear, explainable, and grounded in reality.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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August 20, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Motywowanie pracowników - programy, metody i dobre praktyki

To oczywiste, że o sukcesie organizacji decydują ludzie. Ci powinni być zmotywowani i uśmiechnięci. Wysoki poziom identyfikacji i zaangażowania buduje się długo i mozolne, ale najlepsi managerowie mają sprawdzone techniki, praktyki i metody cierpliwego podnoszenia motywacji zespołów.

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August 20, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical polish

SECURITY TRIBE: SESJA STRATEGICZNA

Podczas wystąpień, case studies i stolików dyskusyjnych omówimy następujące zagadnienia:    Wdrożenie Zero Trust Cybersecurity risk assesment / Risk management / Zarządzanie ryzykiem w organizacji kluczowej Zarządzanie tożsamością / PIM/IAM / IAM Bezpieczenstwo w łancuchu życia aplikacji i systemów (Bezpieczestwo SDLC)

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August 26, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

AI w chmurze czy on-prem? Praktyczne porównanie środowisk w budowie i rozwoju projektów

Marek Laskowski z Domański Zakrzewski Palinka, opierając się na doświadczeniach z wdrażania rozwiązań AI zarówno w chmurze, jak i w środowiskach on-premises, przedstawi praktyczne porównanie obu podejść. Omówi kluczowe aspekty: od kosztów i time-to-market, przez wymagane kompetencje i model organizacji zespołów IT, po utrzymanie i skalowanie rozwiązań. Marek przyjrzy się zaletom i wadom obu modeli i wskaże, jakie kryteria powinny decydować o wyborze środowiska dla konkretnego projektu AI.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

Protecting 182 million wireless customers from harm

AT&T, facing massive data challenges and legacy infrastructure limitations, transformed its operations using Databricks. By unifying data and AI, they created over 100 ML models to combat fraud, optimize dispatch, and improve customer experience.

“Databricks has provided a unified platform that brings together data and AI to deliver predictive solutions that help to protect our customers and our business by stopping fraud before it happens.”

— Kate Hopkins, Vice President, AT&T
 
 

AT&T is dedicated to providing its 182 million wireless customers with secure, reliable and frictionless communications. With 10 million transactions occurring every second, staying ahead of fraudsters — from robocalls and texts to gaming and identity theft — requires harnessing the power of data and AI to stop attacks before they happen. But AT&T’s legacy on-premises architecture created infrastructure complexity and failed to deliver the innovation needed for an optimal customer experience. By modernizing their data infrastructure in the cloud with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, AT&T was able to implement a unified approach to data and AI. They now have over 100 ML models in production that better protect customers and their business, using real-time data, automatic alerts and recommendations to arm employees across AT&T’s operations. With a unified lakehouse architecture for data and AI, AT&T has already significantly reduced fraud, and has a robust roadmap to deliver more data-driven solutions that will help to democratize AI across the business.

Outgrowing a legacy on-premises data architecture

AT&T had been operating their on-prem environment for years. While they were utilizing data analytics for different use cases, it became clear that they’d outgrown their legacy infrastructure as the types and amount of data expanded. Critical interventions in fraud detection and security required the participation of dozens of teams across different systems to first acquire fraud insight data, and then feed that data to retail, call center, and online systems for alerting and notification. The process was protracted, inefficient, resource-heavy and expensive. More importantly, it was reactive instead of proactive. The rule-based technology used to detect fraud made it difficult to stay ahead of bad actors, especially with the growing number of sophisticated fraud attempts plaguing both customers and their own business.

Similar to fraud detection, AT&T also struggled to gain the real-time insights and automation necessary to optimize dispatch. On their legacy system, AT&T could not unify data points to match a technician’s troubleshooting skills to the customer issue and location. Each unsuccessful attempt to solve an issue increased operational costs while impacting customer experience.

Kate Hopkins, Vice President of AT&T, says, “We wanted to take care of these things automatically. How can we stop robocalling and robotexting? How can we match a tech with the right skills to solve a problem, while also taking into account traffic and weather to predict when they’ll arrive at the house? We couldn’t answer these questions on-prem. It was clear that we had largely tapped the technology that was available to us.”

 

AT&T Uses Databricks to Stop Fraud Before It Happens

AT&T is using data and AI to deliver predictive solutions that protect its customers from fraud. Moving from an on-premises architecture to a cloud-based lakehouse allows AT&T to take in all kinds of data, standardize it and then run ML models that drive fraud alerts in real time.

 

Proactively stopping fraud with Databricks

AT&T chose to migrate to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform because of the open nature of the software and their alignment with the Databricks roadmap. Kate explains, “Every company is moving workloads to the cloud to some extent, but we picked a bolder path. With tools like Databricks and Delta Lake we can get the benefits of the cloud faster. While the other carriers may be doing more lift and shift, we don’t think that’s a recipe for transformation. We’re going to the next level.”

To do so, AT&T first launched Databricks with their data science team. They pumped their on-premises data into Delta Lake, moved their workloads to the cloud, and created a Center of Excellence (CoE) with training and community support to expand adoption and data democratization going forward. Focusing on fraud detection as their first use case, the data science team was able to develop predictive solutions with unified data and AI, and seamless collaboration that stops fraud before it happens. Kate says, “We’re able to ingest huge amounts of structured and unstructured data coming from different systems, standardize it, and then build ML models that deliver alerts and recommendations that empower employees in our call centers, stores, and online.” Building on the positive experience of the data science team, Databricks is being introduced to the data science organizations in AT&T’s business units.

 

Reducing the impact of fraud before it happens

Since moving away from their rules-based fraud system and creating ML models for real-time, automatic fraud detection, AT&T has reduced fraud by up to 80% with over 100 fraud detection ML models in production. “Now that our fraud detection is real time, we can outwit fraudsters and stay ahead of their efforts in areas like fraudsters gaming the system, illegal unlocks, robocalls and robotexts, and identify theft,” says Hopkins.

Fraud detection is just one example of how AT&T can make an impact with scalable, democratized data access and AI on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Moving forward, AT&T will continue to increase adoption for use cases benefiting dispatch, service reliability, quality of coverage, and sales growth. Their goal is to be completely off the AT&T on-prem data lake by 2023.

Looking forward, Hopkins says, “We still get a lot of business benefits from data analytics, but it doesn’t compare to the scale of benefits we can engender when we apply AI. We’re looking to continue that trend and accelerate it. We know that there’s a lot of potential and now we can realize it.”

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
Sibelga
Bahadir Samli
Bahadir Samli
CIO
ING Belgique
2-Feb-29-2024-11-35-00-9309-AM
Bart Kerkhofs
Vice President & Head of IT
Bridgestone EMIA
Untitled design (1)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-57-AM
Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
Euroclear
1-Feb-29-2024-11-34-59-8990-AM
Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
Untitled design-Nov-22-2023-08-42-05-3178-AM
Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
Johnson & Johnson
Piet_De_Ceuleners
Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
1658251930890
Dirk De Bevere
Large Enterprise Sales Leader
Telenet Business
Untitled design-7
Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
Red Hat
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Geert Lejon
Geert Lejon
Vice President Head of Belux / Head of Comms Benelux
Cognizant
Kevin_Ledegen
Kevin Ledegen
Group IT director
SDWorx
Gunter-Van-Craen_Small
Gunter Van Craen
Chief Digital & Information Officer
Bekaert
Thomas Kessler
Thomas Kessler
Partner | CIO Programme Leader
Deloitte
Emmanuel Gob
Emmanuel Gob
CIO
DPD
pascal pauwels
Pascal Pauwels
CIO
Colruyt
Untitled design (4)-Dec-13-2023-10-53-15-5032-AM
Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
Dell Technologies
benoit dewaele
Benoît Dewaele
Group IT Directo
Vandemoortele
Dirk Deridder-1
Dirk Deridder
CTO - Technology Services & Practices
SMALS
Thierry Driesens
Thierry Driesens
CIO
TVH
Untitled design-Sep-18-2023-11-59-29-7866-AM
Koen Vandaele
CIO
Delen Private Bank
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Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
Kyndryl BeLux
steven-vermeulen
Steven Vermeulen
CIO
Digitaal Vlaanderen
Jack Hamande
Jack Hamande
Director General Digital Transformation
Federale Overheidsdienst Beleid en Ondersteuning
Tom Tomczak
Tom Tomczak
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
NRB
1726588748718
Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
Agence du Numérique
an swalens
An Swalens
Head Of IT (CIO)
National Bank of Belgium
Untitled design (2)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-68-AM
Elke Laeremans
Chief Digital & Supply Chain Officer at Casa International
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Koen Van Loo
Koen Van Loo
CIO
Group S.
Peter Sany
Peter Sany
Executive Advisor
Zoom
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Steven De Haes
Steven De Haes
Dean
Antwerp Management School
Marleen Thorré
Marleen Thorré
Head of Digital EMEA
Mitsubishi Chemical Group
christel-plessers
Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
Mercedes-Benz Europe

Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
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
Founder - MD
Untitled design (1)-2
Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
1-Dec-16-2021-02-15-57-02-PM
Eman De Sutter
Program Manager
4-Feb-08-2022-10-22-09-03-AM
Shelly Deracourt
Program 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
Junior Event Manager
ML B-W-1
Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller
Vlera Berishaa (1)
Vlera Berisha
Junior Community Manager
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Programme & Event Manager

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!