Partner in the spotlight: Cegeka
For our first "Partner in the Spotlight"-interview of 2021, we had the pleasure to interview Bert Brouns of Cegeka.
Hi Bert, can you introduce yourself and what is your role at Cegeka?
My name is Bert Brouns, I’m an Enterprise Architect and Guild lead at Cegeka.
As an Enterprise Architect I support teams and organizations in their operational and strategic endeavors. I’m part of the leadership team for the .NET Development guild at Cegeka’s Applications division. With our guild we want to facilitate the .NET community at Cegeka in knowledge sharing, learning & development matters and other initiatives that trigger the interests of developers, architects and other people with a technical background.
Can you tell us a bit more about Cegeka?
Cegeka is a family owned ICT service provider. Our HQ is located at Corda Campus in Hasselt, Belgium and we have satellite-offices in Ghent, Antwerp and Leuven. Cegeka has branches in other European countries, such as the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Romania and the Czech republic.
Cegeka can act as a one-stop-shop for organizations in all things digital, providing a broad range of services in the entire aspect of digitization and automation.
Cegeka is one of our newest partners. Why do you sponsor Visug?
We decided to sponsor VISUG because we want to invest in Belgium’ developer communities. We hope that we are able to contribute more than just monetary sponsorship of course.
How do you see the value of the community for your employees?
VISUG opens up another venue for gaining knowledge for our colleagues. I’m sure some colleagues at Cegeka already followed the events, but by actively participating as a sponsor we can “drink our own champagne” and promote the VISUG events actively during our own knowledge sharing activities.
We will challenge our own communities to come up with ideas for talks or sessions and will support our colleagues with the preparation and execution.
If we organize a Visug evening together, what does such an evening ideally look like?
A combination of learning, knowledge sharing and networking in a relaxed setting, with appreciation for feedback. An inclusive event where all members of the developer community are welcome, and where people feel free to contribute.
How do you think (community) events will evolve (in-person or online) after Corona?
I believe a combination of in person and virtual events is going to be the norm. Virtual meetings eliminate the need for travel and require some less practical planning for rooms, catering, whatnot, but also do not offer the same possibilities for ad hoc discussions, chats or networking.
We’ve experimented with satellite meetings before, in which we hold the same meeting over several locations, where we combine common, virtual parts with localized break-out meetings. That could be something to explore further.
Thank you for your time, Bert.