COMMON Europe Congress Proves You Still Need People
Juan Manuel Alcudia, outgoing president of COMMON Europe, and Steve Bradshaw, longtime member of the COMMON Europe Advisory Council, reflect on the state of the IBM Power community on the continent
IBM Power users from across the world will descend on Lyon, France, June 14-17 for the community’s biggest event of the year, Common Europe Congress 2026.
Put together by Common Europe in collaboration with Common France, the event will welcome attendees from about 30 countries, providing a multicultural, multi-lingual environment where attendees learn from top IBM industry experts, network with other IBM Power users and see the latest offerings from European and worldwide solutions providers.
For those who put in the effort to get to know these experts, the conference and its resulting relationships can amount to free consulting, even after considering the cost of attendance, says Steve Bradshaw, a longtime member of the Common Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) and a veteran European Congress attendee. “So if you could learn enough in four days there that saved you buying two days of a consultant time or stopped you buying a bad product, this would pay for itself,” Bradshaw tells TechChannel. (See his appearance on IT Social Hour here.)
In addition to having experts on hand for one-on-one learning opportunities, the conference will feature about 200 sessions, covering topics like modernization, system administration and security and compliance, with the common thread of AI running through many of those discussions.
While the technologists attending those sessions will come from a variety of backgrounds—Common Europe is the umbrella organization for 19 smaller user groups spread across 18 countries—they will have plenty in to talk about. “Most of us have the same issues with the machines and the same issues in the installations and the same issues with the development … so I think it’s so nice to have this kind of community,” Juan Manuel Alcudia, outgoing Common Europe president, tells TechChannel.
CEAC: IBM i’s Voice of Europe
The diverse constituency served at Common Europe Congress is the same one served by CEAC, the European advisory council that helps IBM i evaluate product ideas from its user community. Along with its counterpart advisory council from the U.S., CEAC works with IBM to review every IBM i idea submitted to the IBM Ideas Portal and decide which are worth pursuing for product implementation. According to Bradshaw, there can be over 4,000 proposals in the portal at any given time, and CEAC reviews each one, regardless of length or detail.
Council members first privately vote on and rank each idea individually, then again as a group at the council’s monthly meetings, two of which are in person every year. Some submitted ideas may already exist or may not be immediately feasible because they would require an OS rework, Bradshaw notes.
But just because an idea can’t be pursued now doesn’t mean it can’t be implemented a few product generations down the line. “[IBM] actually cares about the ideas,” Bradshaw says. “They really do bring a high percentage of these ideas and actually deliver upon them.”
From the F8 Key to Db2 Mirror … and Beyond
Changes brought about by ideas submitted to CEAC vary in terms of scope. They include OS-altering changes like row access control and Db2 Mirror, but also the simpler improvements.
For instance, Bradshaw himself once suggested that the F8 key be put into service as a “reverse retrieve” key on the 5250 command line, complementing the already-existing F9 “retrieve” key. It took about 10 years and an “I (heart) F8” t-shirt campaign, but IBM eventually adopted the idea.
“I sat in a conference in Sweden when they announced that, and there was a round of applause, and it was one of the proudest days of my life,” Bradshaw says.
It was a reminder that ideas shpherded by CEAC can be large or small. “They can be Db2 Mirror or they can just be a function key. And we’re working on some very exciting ideas right now as part of the user group,” Bradshaw says.
One priority of CEAC is ensuring IBM i can authenticate email relay connections via Open Authorization 2.0 (OAuth2), replacing the username-and-password authentication that major providers like Google and Microsoft are moving away from. OAuth2, Bradshaw explains, is similar to an API token in that it grants access to a resource without using a password.
CEAC has also been focusing on IBM’s embrace of open source and ensuring IBM i’s compatibility with modern languages like Python and Node.js. “There’s a lot of work going on in the background with us helping IBM pick which of the languages that they keep up to date,” Bradshaw says. Those conversations, he adds, can get “very passionate.”
Security is a major topic of conversation on CEAC as well. Currently, a big part of that discussion is the council’s desire to see native IBM i implementation of the Automated Certificate Management Engine (ACME). ACME would automate a certificate renewal process that currently must be repeated every 47 days on IBM i.
“It’s such a problem at the moment that I’m one of the people that’s working on an open-source version of this for IBM i called RITFori,” Bradshaw notes.
Common Europe Congress 2026 Marks End of an Era
Common Europe Congress marks the end of Alcudia’s four-year term as president of Common Europe. Alcudia spent one year as vice president of the organization before replacing former president Ranga Deshpande in 2022.
Alcudia called his final year as president “one of the best years of my life in terms of my relationship with the community and traveling, representing Common Europe.”
Despite this, he insists he is happy to hand over the reigns. While he’s enjoyed his time with the Executive Committee, the best way to push Common Europe forward is by bringing in fresh faces and fresh ideas—“because after five years, I’m no longer the new guy that comes with the new ideas,” Alcudia says.
But he will remain an active part of the Common Europe community, believing that the support and knowledge that users share with each other will guide them through challenges like modernization and the uncertainty surrounding AI.
“I think the community in these times will be still relevant because you will need to learn from the experience of the other people,” Alcudia says. “I think [AI] can be a very interesting tool to help you, but still you need the knowledge of the platform, the knowledge of the applications. … I think being in the community will be so important.”