IBM i 30th Anniversary Celebration Begins

Here we go! As I hinted in my last post, it’s time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of IBM i—and that celebration starts today, officially.

We had a “preview party” of sorts at the RPG & DB2 Summit a few weeks ago, and we had a great time. Now, we get to start celebrating with the rest of the IBM i community.

Most of you will remember that the celebration of the 25th anniversary in 2013 focused on the past: the history of the platform, its early days, its architecture and how that history brought us to the present.

Now it’s 2018, and while all that history is still true—and still important—the 30th anniversary is going to be focused on the future! In fact, here’s the social tile, with the forward-looking slogan:

Our celebration will have an on-line home, which you can get to by visiting the IBM i homepage on ibm.com and clicking on the link, or by clicking here.

To help us celebrate, our team has asked for client volunteers to tell us stories of how they are using IBM i innovations in their businesses. And, wow, did we get a lot of volunteers from all over the world. The celebration home page will unveil story after story over the next 10 weeks or so. Each story highlights a client and the IBM i innovations they’re using.

In addition to reading the stories, the #IBMi30 mini-site will be a place for you to share comments, follow the #IBMi30 action on social media, see what our IBM i Fresh Faces are up to and more.

But that’s not all! At many of the IBM i events throughout the rest of the year, we’ll be celebrating the 30th anniversary with any and all of you who attend. The POWERUp18 event run by the COMMON organization will be the central event, since it’s the largest gathering of IBM i clients annually. (I’ll write next week about that event in particular.) But as I said, we already did some celebrating at the RPG & DB2 Summit, I’ll be joining the crowd in COMMON Belgium in April, in the U.K. at i-UG’s International Power event in June, at the COMMON Europe Congress in Poland, with our Japanese community at iSUC 2018 and more. The rest of the team will be spreading out at other events—user groups, conferences, customer visits, business partner events and so on.

On social media, search for and follow the #IBMi30 hashtag, and you’ll be able to share in the many experiences virtually.

Another aspect of this 30th celebration will be to re-emphasize a couple of themes—the influx of young talent to the IBM i community through Fresh Faces, as well as the transformation of the platform into an equal player in mobile, cloud, analytics and cognitive.

I’m looking forward to being able to enjoy your company at the many events and on social media—and so is the rest of the team. Let’s have some fun, and really celebrate 30 years of this wonderful platform!