I Left Munich Worried. I Left Lyon Hopeful.

GSE AK IBM Power, Common Europe Congress 2026, and the community we are building — one event at a time.

June had other plans for me. On the 8th, I was in Munich for the GSE AK IBM Power event. A week later, I was parking my car in Lyon after a long drive from Germany for the Common Europe Congress. And this week — June 24th — I stood in front of a Hollerith punched-card machine from the 1880s in the IBM history museum in Ehningen and thought: 140 years of data processing, and we still can’t fill a conference room in Munich.

But let me tell you the full story.

Munich: The Right People, Not Enough of Them

The GSE AK IBM Power event in Munich had a solid program. IBM Spyre use cases, Power Cyber Vault presented by Alexander Paul, a TrendMicro SAP content and system virus scanner session, the AIX 7.3 TL4 update, and IBM Concert on IBM Power. Security, AI acceleration, AIOps, maintenance — the full picture of what modern IBM Power looks like in production. The people there knew their stuff. The conversations were technical and honest. Nobody tried to sell me a solution for a problem I don’t have — which, in IT, is already something.

But the room was not full.

I don’t want to be unfair to Munich — it is a fine city, and the organizers work hard. But the IBM Power community in the DACH region is smaller than it should be. We have the knowledge. We have the experience. We just need more people showing up. I left Munich with a quiet worry in my bag, right next to my laptop charger.

And then I drove to Lyon.

Common Europe Congress 2026 in Lyon

The Common Europe Congress was different. The room was full. The hallways were loud. People came from everywhere — and when I say everywhere, I mean it.

Chris Gibson flew in from Australia. Australia! 35 hours of flight with many stops between Sydney and Lyon. I sometimes complain about a one-hour traffic jam on the A3. Chris spent more time in airport terminals than I spent driving to France, and he still delivered a full AIX Live Update workshop the moment he arrived. If that does not tell you something about the dedication of the IBM Power community, I don’t know what will.

AIX Live Update: Workshop and Real Life

The workshop with Chris was excellent. Live Update is one of those features that sounds great in a marketing presentation and then gets much more interesting — and complicated — when you try it in production. That is why the session that followed was so valuable.

Christian Sonnemans, IBM Champion from the Netherlands, presented his practical experience with Live Update. The combination worked perfectly: Chris showed how it should work, and Christian showed how it actually works when you do it on a real production system. I enjoyed every minute of it.

AIX Roadmap and What Open Source Looks Like Today

Sanket Rathi, AIX and VIOS chief architect at IBM, ran two sessions I would have attended even if I had to skip everything else. The first — “AIX Roadmap and Platform Innovations: Performance, Security, Availability and Operational Simplicity” — is exactly what it sounds like: the full picture of where AIX is going. If you run AIX and you are not following Sanket’s work, you are missing things that matter.

The second session, “Modernizing AIX with Open Source: Toolbox, DNF, AI, and the Roadmap,” was about open source on AIX. This one had some very interesting moments. Promising and sobering in equal measure. The direction is good. The pace could be better.

The Keynote Nobody Saw Coming

I should probably tell you something. I am the organizer of the AIX/Linux track at Common Europe Congress. You might expect that to mean I had everything planned well in advance. You would be wrong.

On Sunday evening — the day before presentations at the conference started — I was informed that a new AIX/Linux keynote was planned and that I had to deliver it. Meaning: find speakers, get them on stage together, by tomorrow morning. A quick scramble, a few messages, and somehow Wennie Allen, Sanket Rathi, and David Spurway agreed to step on stage together and deliver an AIX/Linux keynote on zero notice. They did it brilliantly — even when David’s demo decided it had completely other plans and refused to cooperate. The best sessions often have a story behind them.

Icinga, CI/CD, and the Full IBM Power Stack

Toshaan Bharvani came from Belgium and showed how to monitor IBM Power environments with Icinga and how to set up CI/CD pipelines that cover AIX, Linux on Power, and IBM i together. If you still run your automation as if AIX and Linux are two completely separate worlds, Toshaan has some opinions about that. And he is right.

Open Source for IBM Power — The LibrePower Story

Hugo Blanco, from Sixe, Spain, talked about open source for IBM Power and the real obstacles on this road. There are more than you might expect. Hugo runs the LibrePower project and if you care about open source in the IBM Power ecosystem — and you should — subscribe to it. I mean it. The ecosystem needs people like Hugo pushing in this direction.

The Roundtable That Mattered

The highlight of the conference for me — and I say this as someone who attended excellent technical sessions all day — was the roundtable with Wennie Allen. Wennie is a Product Management Executive at IBM Austin, and she came to Lyon to listen and to talk. That combination is rarer than you think.

We talked about community building. Where we are, what is missing, and what both IBM and the community can do about it. Wennie asked real questions and listened to real answers. It was the right conversation, and Lyon was the right place for it.

Ehningen: 140 Years of IBM in One Room

This week I was in Ehningen near Stuttgart for the IBM Champions DACH meetup. The IBM Campus there has a private history museum — you cannot just walk in off the street — and we got to see it.

The collection starts with Hollerith machines. Herman Hollerith invented them in the 1880s to tabulate the US census, and that technology became the foundation of IBM. I stood in front of one of those machines and thought about everything that came after: mainframes, AS/400, POWER processors, AIX, VIOS, IBM i. One unbroken line from punched cards to the AIX Live Update with zero downtime.

It is good to remember where we all came from sometimes.

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The Community Is Small. That Has to Change.

I am going to say the thing I kept thinking all month. The IBM Power community has incredible people. Chris, Sanket, Christian, Toshaan, Hugo, Wennie — this is a group that knows its craft, shares honestly, and shows up. Sometimes from Australia, after 35 hours in the air.

But we are too small. The Munich room was not full. CEC in Lyon was better, but we all know it could be bigger.

If you work with AIX, VIOS, IBM i, or Linux on Power, and you are not involved with this community, I want to ask you: why not? You have something to say. Your production experience, your automation tricks, your migration lessons — someone in that room needs to hear them.

Submit a talk for next year. Start a blog. Come to the next event. Wennie Allen flew from Austin to Lyon to listen to us. You can register from your laptop.

The community is ours to build. Let’s actually build it.

Have fun at your next IBM Power event!

Andrey

Hi, I am Andrey Klyachkin, IBM Champion and IBM AIX Community Advocate. This means I don’t work for IBM. Over the last twenty years, I have worked with many different IBM Power customers all over the world, both on-premise and in the cloud. I specialize in automating IBM Power infrastructures, making them even more robust and agile. I co-authored several IBM Redbooks and IBM Power certifications. I am an active Red Hat Certified Engineer and Instructor.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

You can meet me at events like IBM TechXchange, the Common Europe Congress, and GSE Germany’s IBM Power Working Group sessions.