During various sessions at its CopaConnect event, Copaco brought together practical building blocks and a broad view on China. From the AI race to the unique asset Europe holds: trust.
At CopaConnect in De Montil in Affligem, Copaco brought its ecosystem together with a clear dual message: partners gain time and margin through automation and services, while simultaneously needing to take a more strategic view on AI adoption, data sovereignty, and the geopolitical reality reshaping the technology sector.
From its unique market position, Copaco offered many inspiring sessions.
Goodbye to ‘Box Mover’
In the breakout session ‘Operational Excellence‘, Bekim Buzaki (Account Manager Copaco Cloud) outlines how Copaco positions itself as a cloud service provider, platform provider, and distributor. “Copaco Cloud is not just another cloud distributor. What makes us unique is that we are a cloud service provider, platform provider, and distributor in one. Two years ago, we launched a brand new, intuitive, and fully automated platform. This saves time and prevents human errors.”
This platform approach is based on a concrete offering and underlying infrastructure. Buzaki lists, among other things, proprietary private cloud solutions, 24/7 support, and a NOC (Network Operations Center). “Today, we already serve more than 1,000 partners through the Copaco portal.”
Data sovereignty runs as a common thread through his story. “With Copaco VMware Cloud, we guarantee that data remains in the data center you select in Belgium or the Netherlands. Full ownership remains guaranteed, thanks to management by local teams in Europe. This way, you maintain complete legal and operational control,” says Buzaki.
Copaco couples this with scalable support for partners. “When you lack resources or specific knowledge, our consultants can step in — even white-labeled under your brand.”
Building in Minutes
Timo Veld, product owner of the Copaco Cloud platform, translates the above into product choices. “Our product goal is a reliable, future-proof cloud platform that helps partners grow, drives automation and innovation, and broadens our offering,” he says. “To drive automation, we need to open up APIs.”
Veld immediately made it concrete with API examples. “Through the billing API, you read all invoice data, the catalog API mirrors the marketplace catalog in your own software, and with the order and subscription API, you create and manage orders and subscriptions.”
Automation is not ‘one size fits all’.
Timo Veld, product owner of the Copaco Cloud platform
According to Veld, automation is not ‘one size fits all‘, which is why he wants targeted input. “You — the MSPs — know best what you want to automate. Use our feedback portal to indicate which workflows you need. Custom work, in other words. After all, if you become more successful, so do we.”
AI Workflows and DEX in Practice
Eric Waterschoot (Digital Strategist) keeps it pragmatic and demonstrates in a demo how to automate repetitive marketing and content tasks. “I create API connections with AI tools: enriching data, generating SEO headlines, fact-checking, and immediately preparing the output in HTML,” he says. “You can also link the same workflow to Mailchimp via an API key, and generate posts for Facebook and Instagram — with a human in the loop for the final check.”
Anne-Catherine Everard (Channel Development Manager HP Solutions at HP) explains in her session the need for efficiency logic within the digital employee experience (DEX). “We manage millions of endpoints with the HP Workforce Experience Platform (WXP). Based on that data and AI, we detect trends and causes, predict problems, and automate solutions,” she says. “Our data lake is in Frankfurt — that helps customers concerned about sovereignty.”
She gives an example of proactive service to frame everything. “For instance, the Insight agent detects a potential hardware problem and automatically opens a case. The next working day, someone is at the door to replace the part,” Everard explains.
Sell Trust
The substantial finale is for Tom Van de Weghe (Correspondent for VRT, among others), who takes the audience along the highway where Chinese innovation, American platform power, and European survival chances intersect. “This is not distant geopolitics. It determines whether companies here will thrive or disappear in the next ten years,” he opens.
Van de Weghe sets out three actions. One: understand the real China. “Stop seeing China as just a cheap factory. Today, China is advanced AI, mass production of robots, and BCIs — if you only read Western summaries, you remain blind.”
Two: deploy AI now. “We need to deploy AI today — not after another committee meeting. Your Chinese competitor sees AI as the chance to destroy you. The question is not whether AI will transform your sector, but whether you will lead or become roadkill,” he states sharply.
Three: make trust our superpower. “We need to stop apologizing for GDPR and the AI Act. We need to sell it. Yes, we might be more expensive than Chinese alternatives, but we never give away your data. We’re not as fast as Silicon Valley, but we don’t change the terms while you sleep,” says Van de Weghe. “In a world where a tech billionaire can halt military operations and Chinese companies must share data with Beijing, boring, European reliability might be pure gold.”
Make trust your superpower.
Tom Van de Weghe
His conversation with a young Chinese AI entrepreneur stuck with him. “She laughed when I asked how she sees Europe: ‘you make good machines and have a lot of rules’. But when I asked what she would think if Europe became a leader in trustworthy AI — transparent, privacy-protecting, democratic — she fell silent: ‘that would be interesting… if we could trust AI, that would matter.'”
Little Doubt
CopaConnect left little doubt: operational excellence and strategic resilience belong together according to Copaco. On one hand, there is a very concrete way forward: automating and outsourcing without losing control, and building data-sovereign in local data centers with certified processes. “With Copaco, you get sovereignty in every aspect — technical, legal, and operational,” Buzaki summarizes his story.
With us, you get sovereignty in every aspect — technical, legal, and operational.
Bekim Buzaki, Account Manager Copaco Cloud
On the other hand, there is the urgency to approach AI not as a project but as a deployment discipline, with trust as a differentiator towards customers explicitly asking for compliance, stability, and predictability. Or as Van de Weghe puts it: “Technology is rewriting the rules. We can become spectators or choose technological sovereignty. The choice is really ours.”