Common Europe Congress 2023

An introduction to techniques and exercises to help you look after, develop and use your voice effectively for public speaking. This practical overview offers advice and tips for handling nervousness, correct breathing, tone, creating vocal variation etc. to actively engage with your audience .

As you develop your career, your technical eminence can be a rocket propelling you forward. In this session, learn about how you can build technical eminence, increase the visibility of your eminence through advocacy, and reach the heights of eminence through the IBM Champions program. Bring your ideas and questions to this interactive session. The session is for everyone - and all current IBM Champions are invited to share your stories with the attendees.

Modernization and innovation go hand in hand. Transitioning from a traditional data center to a secure Hybrid cloud architecture can be made simple. We demonstrate Cloud solutions for IBM on AWS/Azure, Cloud Architecture, Data Protection & DR strategies. Connectria Hybrid accelerates the first step of your modernization journey with a traditional lift and shift migration by refactoring the core IBMi/AIX systems On-Net directly to public Cloud.

Do you find yourself speechless in front of an audience? Does your heart race, your mouth parch, and your perspiration gush? Do your hands shake, your palms sweat, and your knees knock?

You are not alone. Your fear and nervousness is a natural phenomenon - and one that you can overcome. This session helps you understand your fears and shows you how to deal with them.

Trevor shares his experience gained while speaking around the world and what he has learned from his speaking mentors. This session explores specific, practical techniques that you can use to remove your fear of speaking. You can learn to speak with confidence!

I will give an overview of the key elements that are important to include for a successful modernization project. Modernization is not just about changing technology; it primarily involves improving and streamlining existing business processes. This is done in order not to jeopardize the unique services and features that already exist in the solution.

Alan and Charlie will open the floor for an open discussion about the value of custom code, and how it gives businesses their proprietary advantages.
What are the responsibilities and roles for everyone in your organization to promote better business continuity, workflows, and overall user experiences?

Trevor will present insights into developing slide decks to best represent your presentation topics, suit your presentation style, and facilitate the delivery of your message without distraction and more effectively than ever before.

This session will teach keynote speakers, breakout speakers, and business presenters to uplift their slide decks to match the level of their topic and message. The philosophy espoused follows three tenets for slide decks - that they should be clean, concise, and consistent. You'll leave with a newfound respect for your slides and be a more stunning presenter!

Stop waiting to start your futurization journey. Analysis prior to taking action in a transformation initiative is smart, but many get caught in analysis paralysis. As you determine long-term vision, you can simultaneously take smaller steps toward modernization that will support any end-objective. Join us for the session to explore starting your journey NOW without risking any futurization goals.

This session is for business executives, and focuses on business value that is created when modernizing in a phased approach. We will not get into programming details, but stay focused on business drivers and demands, and how IT can support the business objectives while "keeping the lights on" with their current workload.

This session will cover:
1.) When to consider open-source over the RPG language, and how to get going
2.) Getting buy-in to a modernization initiative by your RPG programmers, allowing them to engage, participate, and contribute to the journey while collaborating with people with differing skillsets.
3.) When you should consider a new package (with integration) vs. packages vs code or database transformation
4.) Aligning Business and IT to have a common goal, utilizing the best of both resources to ensure success.

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right”. This quote by Henry Ford demonstrates the impact of having positive psychology. When we trust in our abilities and are honest in our communication, we can have incredibly powerful and productive business relationships. Employees that are satisfied are more productive, innovative and better problem solvers. Positive psychology extends into our personal lives, improving health, wellbeing, and a higher quality of life. Come to this session to learn how to tap into and harness the many benefits of positive psychology.

The Valence Framework for IBM i, available for free download, includes a browser-based low-code development utility called Nitro App Builder (NAB), through which anyone with a solid understanding of their IBM i database can create dazzling web or mobile apps, including dashboards and data grids with download-to-Excel functionality, all in a matter of minutes! Running entirely on IBM i, the NAB tool can also be used to create intricate file maintenance apps, through which users can adjust content in one or more physical files — you control which fields they can see and/or edit.

All of this can be achieved with no coding, though IBM i developers can easily extend the app's functionality with RPG or SQL code to handle business logic as needed. Advanced programmers comfortable with HTML5 and JavaScript code can take things even further, creating super elaborate data-entry apps that work hand-in-hand with server-side RPG logic through the Valence Portal.

The bottom line:  With Valence, whether you're a seasoned RPG developer or a super user with intimate knowledge of your system's physical files, you can crank out highly functional web and mobile apps on IBM i in no time — no prior experience in web or mobile development required. Come to this quick demo session to see the latest release of the Valence framework, and how easy it is to quickly build and deploy such an app on your system.

Japan has been one of the country which has a lot of IBM i users for 30 years. And there are still new IBM i users in Japan every year. Many IBM i users will continue to use IBM i to support their core business

The use of IBM i has evolved over a long period of time, and in the past two years, a new trend of the cloud era has come to the IBM i world at once. In particular, REST-API and Power Virtual Server are two epoch-making technologies, and advanced client references are increasing.

We left IBM after 10 years of working for IBM, which created the opportunity for us to become IBM i fans, and joined OmniScience to launch a service that combines cloud computing and IBM i. Through our experiences at IBM and OmniScience, we would like to introduce the trend of IBM i in Japan in the cloud era and some customer case studies.

A case study in depth: from a huge Cobol IBM i system to a multi-platform system (IBM i- Linux - MSSQL – Oracle)
We would like to talk about the benefit and the high level solutions to run software systems both on IBM I and open environments (Linux, AIX, Windows, etc.) with other DBMS than DB2.
In particular we would like to talk about how most important components of an IBM i system are managed to become “portable”:
• Business Logic: Code and Language conversion, System Commands support, System APIs support, Communication between languages
• Database: Native I/O and SQL Access, SQL and different dialects, EBCDIC and ASCII conversion, data migration
• Presentation: Video and report management

Many things have changed since June 1988: music, clothes, the way we have relationships with others…
but... did you change the way you use IBM i? Should IBM push you to do it? The platform Paradigma has been always to be able to run "old code" but this comes with a price:
"technical debt". The platform is as modern or old as the way we use it. Should IBM change this paradigma and start deprecating old features?
I even asked chatGPT about it! Can we make IBM i a valid and simpler alternative to the complex Kubernetes?

Another year, even more innovation on the IBM i and Power platform. IBM i clients are continuing to create new applications and use cases, taking advantage of new technologies like AI, IoT, cloud and more. Join this session with Brandon Pederson, IBM i and Power Product Marketing Manager, to hear the latest client success stories of IBM i from the past year. You'll leave with new ideas and inspired to innovate on the platform within your own business.

Curious about what is the latest in technology?
Are you tired of being the “deer in the headlights” when others talk tech?
As technologists, it is incumbent upon us to be able to speak to what is new.
This session will highlight key technologies to give you some basic awareness.

An in-depth practical session to develop and build vocal delivery and confidence for public speaking. Following the content from part 1, this session allows you to practice the exercises and techniques using speeches and texts in a group environment and receive feedback on your 'performance'.