Europe’s IBM Power Wishlist: Steve Bradshaw on IT Social Hour
Steve Bradshaw, a longtime member of the COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC), discusses the top priorities of the European Power community
Listen to the audio-only version
The following transcript was edited for clarity:
Andy Wig:
Yeah. So Steve, how long have you been on CEAC?
Steve Bradshaw:
Yeah, so just shy of 15 years now, one five. It’s been an interesting journey.
Andy:
Yeah. I mean, maybe give me an idea of what the council does. I know it’s a forum for ideas to kind of bubble up.
Steve:
Be delighted to, because I think a lot of people, even if they’ve heard of it, don’t necessarily know what we do. So CAC, to begin with, Common Europe Advisory Council, CEAC. It’s the sister organization to the Common Americas Advisory Council. So you’ve got two advisory councils there and these are the two advisory councils that IBM looks to to get views on what they should do when developing IBM i. Now the thing about the CAC and the CAC is we both work with IBM under non-disclosure agreements. So we do actually get right into the weeds on what’s coming next and indeed the value propositions. Some of these conversations can be very detailed and very heated in our opinions and that’s great because over that period of time, IBM learns to trust what the CAC and the CEAC are saying as well as they do with the LUG, the large user group.
And they don’t always do what we say, don’t get me wrong, but we have that ability to fight for things. Now, what is it we’re fighting for in the Common European Advisory Councils or the Common America Advisory Council? Well, primarily we are driven by reviewing IBM ideas. So the ideas are going to the IBM Ideas portal. Now the IBM Ideas portal is the latest incarnation. There was one before called the RFPs and one before that called the IDEA. Yeah, called it RFEs. So the IDEAS portal, anyone can submit an idea about IBM i and say, “I think this would be a good idea.” And I can pick the operating system in the category. Maybe it’s something to do with the Navigator tool, maybe it’s something to do with BRMS, whatever it is. And they’ll put in there what they want. And sometimes people write ideas better than others.
Some people can go to a great deal of detail and you’re thinking, wow, you really are passionate about this. Sometimes people just look like a single sentence. And IBM is obligated to review these, but they don’t always understand the value of what it is that person’s trying to get across, particularly if that person hasn’t got English as their first language. So this is where the CAC and the CEAC come in. We sit there, we review every single IBM I idea that is submitted, everyone. And we vote on them and we rank them ourselves initially privately and then as a group. So that means that we meet every month, 10 times a year online, two times a year in person. And we go through every single one of these ideas and if it already exists, we’ll tell the person in a polite way that you can already do this by doing such and such.
If it doesn’t quite make sense, we’ll tease out some of the detail. And let’s just say it was a French person. We’ll find a French speaking person to go and speak to them in the native tone and say, “Okay, what is it you’re trying to achieve?” And then we’ll get that back in English so that the development team can actually deal with it. And sometimes we’ll pile on and go, “Okay, well, that’s a great idea. And if you did this as well, then it would have this big broad appeal.” And why is that important? Well, because IBM I team in Rochester and the other offices, they actually care about the ideas. They really do bring a high percentage of these ideas and actually deliver upon them. And the number of ideas that we have in the IBM i world is five times greater than the next category, which is AIX, which is twice as much as the next category after that, which is HMC.
So we’ve got about 4,700 ideas as I look at this now in the portal. I would say of those, probably 75% have been delivered already and another sort of 20% I’ll look for review right now. Those are very rough figures. I do have some more up to date, but I’m not going to dig in for the purposes of this. What I want you to take from this is that IBM takes these ideas very seriously. So as the Common Europe Advisory Council, we always say at all of our meetings that any of the 19 different, one nine, different user groups that make up Common Europe as a federated group. So to express that, there are 19 different organizations, common organizations across Europe with one single umbrella organization that’s common Europe so we can have the big events and have IBM dealing with the CAC as a single entity.
And we talk to all of our users and say, “Look, you’re passionate about this operating system. What is it that you want? What is it that actually stops you from doing what you want today?” And they tell us and we’ll help them put an idea in or if they’re not sure how to enter an idea, maybe we’ll do it for them and then we’ll vote on them and over time we help IBM to deliver them. And sometimes these ideas are fabulous ideas, but you’re thinking it’s impossible for IBM to do that in, let’s just say I’ll picking them a five year timeframe. So IBM will have to reject it because they say we don’t want to do it now, but not that we’re not going to do it ever, but we can’t do it now because that would require this huge rework of the operating system. So maybe they’ve got to wait until the next release. And I’ve seen ideas like that that were turned down initially and then came back to life generations later. If you want, I’ll show you my story about my favorite idea, which took three generations of IBM operating system to come out with.
Andy:
I was going to ask you, what have been some standard ideas that have come up. So yes, please.
Steve:
Okay. I mean, there are ideas that are really massive changes to the operating system. Things like row column access control, this idea of being able to mask data even from people with security officer data so that you can have the ability to administer it, but not actually look at it. So it stops sysadmins looking at the payroll detail, right? And then there are things like Db2 Mirror that came out of these large user group and advisory councils that says, “If you don’t do this soon, then people are going to move off this platform.” And then there are the small ideas. The ones that don’t necessarily change the operating system as a whole but make a big difference to a bunch of people. And I’m very proud to be one of the people who actually brought one of those ideas to life. It’s called the F8 key.
Now I don’t know how much of the 5250 command line you’ve ever used. That’s the administration command line that we have. The green on black, you might have heard of it called, right? But when you’re typing in commands, if you want the previous command back, you hit the F9 key and it brings back the previous command. If you want the one before that, you hit F9 again and F9 again, all the way back through your call stack. But until recently, if you went one too far, if you wanted the third one back and you hit it four times, you were SOL, you had to literally clear the line and go back and start again.
Andy:
There’s no redo?
Steve:
There’s no redo in that. So if you just want to step the other way, this is where the F8 key came from. It was just go back the other way. I went back one too far. I want the command the other way again. And I first asked for that in the first year I think that I was actually on the CEAC, it was 15 years ago and the guy said, “Look, we have other priorities other than enhancing the command line. Come on. It’s the command line. We want people to use the web interface or ODBC or all of these things. We’re not doing it. ” And so I went quiet and then three years later I bought you back up again because that’s the time at which you’re allowed to sort of bring things back up and I got rejected again. And so what happened then was the third time, so we’re all like nine years later, I’m really passionate about this now and I know they’re doing some projects on the internal plumbing of the system.
And so I get a t-shirt made that talks about how IBM I would be probably the best operating system in the world, but definitely if it had an F8 key. And so it’s got this big IBM I symbol turned into a love heart on this T-shirt and I was handed them out of conferences and I was getting some sort of rather mixed looks from the IBMers. Some of them thought it was funny, some of them thought you can take that t-shirt and perhaps do something else with it other than wear it. But it just so happened that this caught the attention of some of the IBM development team and they’d heard about it and a guy starts to look at it and says, “Well, this is totally doable. In fact, actually someone’s looked at doing this in the past so we could actually implement this quite quickly.” And so it arrived. And so there were hundreds of us in the end who really liked this, this F8. And so when it was finally delivered, I got a second t-shirt made with a back to the future logo because F8 and IBM i takes you back to the future.
And so you’ll still see people wearing those at conferences today. If you see an IBM i in a heart shape with F8 and Back to the Future, that comes from the 50 or so people that helped me get that idea delivered over 15 … Well, after a 10 year period.
And so the ideas don’t need to be huge, but they are broad appeal. 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. I thought, “Old you it was worth it. ” Amazing. Ideas could be big and they can be 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. And some of them where I’m getting some traction, I’m under an NDA, so I’m not going to talk about those specifically. But if you’d like to know what sort of ideas are bubbling up right now that are, I can talk about, I can give you a couple of examples.
Andy:
Please do.
Steve:
Okay. There’s a change about to happen in the way that email is sent and it’s to do with reducing the amount of spam. Now I’m sure that you’re intimately familiar with the inner workings of how the SMTP relay protocol works. Now not many people are, right? But the whole point is to stop spam, you have to be able to trust the person who’s sending it to you. There are organizations out there whose sole purpose is to take people’s email and pass it on and deliver it. It’d be like the America Postal Service or my own British Royal Mail or the Deutsche Post. When stuff goes into that letter box, they’re obligated to deliver it. You put the money on, you expect it to go. So this is the same for these SMTP relay people, but rather than putting money on it, it used to be that you signed it with a username and password that proved that I have a relationship, you trust me, you’ve said you’re going to deliver my mail, but usernames and passwords are a little bit easy to, if you’re like socially engineer or they get hacked or they get onto lists.
So normally you and I would think, “Oh, well, we’ll use 2FA. I’ll have my special little keycode, my fingerprint or whatever.” Well, an email relay can’t do that. It needs something else that’s the equivalent of a multifactor that regularly proves its trust, and this is a protocol called OAuth 2. Open authority authorization, can’t remember. OAuth2 and two being the second version of it. And this is basically like an API token. So what does that mean? It means that all the IBM Is in the world that want to use Google for their mail relay or Microsoft 365 for their relay within the next 12 months need to be able to authenticate not using a username and password anymore, but using this OAuth 2 token. And guess what? That’s a lot of code. And so we’re working with IBM to chase through the importance of that and not only say, is it a good idea? I think everyone’s saying this is a great idea, but how does it get implemented? Would help shape it as well and test it.
So something like that that’s in the plumbing, that’s really important. Another thing that’s sort of really important to us at the moment is open source. You’ll have no doubts in that over the last decade that IBM’s really pivoted and said, look, you don’t just need to program in RPG or COBOL or IBM i. If you want to program in Python or node, you can do that. But in order to do that, then you need to make sure you’ve got all the modern languages at certain levels. And so 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. And so that has some very passionate conversations about it when you get to which version of node or which other languages that IBM should adopt.
Because once they adopt it, they’ve got to support it as well. So it’s not just a one-time thing. This isn’t just, I’m going to buy you a new shirt. This is like buying you a puppy. I’ve got to pay all its veterinary bills, feed and water it and make sure it’s looked after for the next 20 years.
So those are pretty passionate things going on as well. And then we’ve got lots of things to do with security because God, security is always a nightmare that just never ends.
Andy:
Are you guys talking about Mythos a bunch on there?
Steve:
Or? Yeah. I mean, let’s say yes, because that’s part of an AI conversation that we always get involved with. But also, it’s not a big deal. I know that everyone thinks that the world is about to end, but all Mythos is going to do is show you the vulnerabilities that you’ve always had just a little bit quicker. So you’re going to be getting a whole bunch of things that you probably should have fixed and could have fixed a long time ago, but you’re going to get them more quickly. And the nice thing about Mythos is it just doesn’t give you this … So for those of you who don’t know that Mythos, the idea is that it’s the next generation AI that was originally designed for actually fixing bugs is really good at actually finding bugs as well. So those two go hand in hand. So it’s finding bugs that we didn’t know existed and you can then use it to fix the same bug. It really isn’t such a big deal.
It just means that there’s a short period of time where people who use really important operating systems are going to have to patch more often. Now the great thing for IBM i people is that we don’t tend to put our IBM I’s on the public internet. They tend to be on corporate networks or small business networks. So the fact that this particular, let’s say, packet-based interception, denial of service has been detected by Mythos that can bring down a pool of traffic into an IBM i doesn’t really matter because someone would actually have to break into our buildings and plug into our networks. And if they’re broken into our buildings and plugged into our networks, we’ve probably got bigger problems than that particular bug. So the truth is Mythos is just a next generation. It’s a wonderful piece of hype and advertising that’s based on truth and I’m sure Anthropic are going to be absolutely coining it in because of it, but it is not something we should lose sleep over unless we’re one of these people that decide not to patch our environments. Everything needs to be patched regularly, whether it’s an IBM i, Linux, Windows, z/OS, whatever it is, you need to be putting your security patches on and then Mythos will help you as much as it will hinder you.
Andy:
Is there anything people are losing their sleepover on CEAC? I mean, I know quantum safe encryption and quantum security has been a big talker.
Steve:
Oh, for sure. So we’re all being told that we’re going to lose our jobs to AI. So I suppose as CEAC people, we could be arguing, are we still relevant? Are we the CEAC still relevant to this trusted advisory council made up of people with different skills, whether they’re sysadmins, database guys, business specialists, developers—could we all just be replaced where an AI that just says, tell me what you do next? So maybe that’s what we’re going to leave sleep over. Maybe we’re going to lose our jobs. I mean, that said, we don’t get paid so I’d lose touch with some friends and I wouldn’t get some great meals, but I think that’s the thing that would keep me most awake is that am I still relevant as an advisor
When AIs are really good at advising? But from a point of view of me, I’ll keep my CEAC hat on as a sysadmin. The thing that’s really bothering me, the problem I have that’s just around the corner that we haven’t addressed yet with IBM i is certificate management. Certificates are one of those really boring bits of plumbing that allow us to actually encrypt our data. So if you imagine now a browser interface and you get that little padlock at the top to say, “Yeah, I’m securely connected. I’ve got my TLS, what used to be called an SSL connection.” Well, when I started my career, actually when I started my career, they probably didn’t have certificates. But when I started doing network administration, you get a certificate that lasted 10 years, then it went down to five, then it went down to two, then it went down to one.
It’s at 47 days at the moment and every 47 days you have to do a manual process to apply a new certificate, which implies exporting a certificate request, sending it off to the certificate authority, renewing it, bringing the renewal back, processing it on your machine. And if you don’t do that in time, your machine stops being accessible to its clients. So if you’re open to do that once every 10 years, no problem. Even once a year, no problem. But every 47 days, and I look after a hundred different IBM servers, that suddenly becomes, holy crap, that’s someone’s job. We don’t want that to be the case. There is an automatic protocol called ACME, ACME, makes me think of Roadrunner for people of my age, right?
And it’s the automated certificate management, I think it’s engine, forgive me for not remembering the E and the acronym, ACME. And if you have that loaded on your machine, it’ll automatically say, “Oh, I’m five days away from a certificate. I’ll create the request. I’ll send it to the authority. I’ll get the renewal back and I’ll suck it back in and put it straight on my machine.” And it’s just an automated process. So that’s something that’s one of the open ideas at the moment that IBM is sort could or may be looking at, but 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 Rit For i. Other open source projects exist as the BC would say because we don’t think it can wait. So if there’s anything that’s keeping this part of the CEAC awake at night, it’s the thought of manual certificate management.
ACME is definitely something we need
Andy:
Well those things that’s just like kind of a rote thing you have to do. It’s not really fun or exciting and what’s part of the drudgery aspects of things.
Steve:
Imagine that someone took the scheduler away from you and you had to remember to start all the jobs every day. It’s like that. It’s a piece of automation that just needs to happen that didn’t used to exist, but now it does. So yeah, that one keeps me a little stressy at night and a bit worried. I teach something else that CEAC has been up to recently and I suppose it did keep us awake at home. We were looking to find new members particularly to get more women represented on the CAC. I might have mentioned to you in our previous conversation that the CAC is made up of like 19 different user groups from 18 different countries. We have 17 members on there and we speak 14 languages. We love one thing with IBM i.
So that’s a lot of different things to balance when you’re trying to represent all of Europe, let alone whether they’re then bringing system administrators or business specialists or developers or database people. But then you have to remember gender as well because that also changes things. So I’m delighted to say that we have two of our latest three members are ladies that will be Christina from the Netherlands and the fantastic Catarina from Austria. So we’re starting to get younger and indeed more diverse, not just geographically, but also sexually members of our team and that can only make us better.
Andy:
Is it a matter of kind of, I imagine it can be kind of intimidating of its environment of, I don’t know, a bunch of guys.
Steve:
That’s hilarious. No, you don’t know European women, my friend. They are not intimidated. If I take these two ladies, for example, they’re both very intelligent people who know their subject. So they speak from a position of authority to begin with, but when you combine that with the fact that actually they are go-getting IT professionals, then no, there’s no fear for them at all, not one bit. Plus the fact that it’s worth pointing out now that I mean our SEAC has two liaisons to IBM employees, both of which are women, Sabine Jordan out of Germany and Sara Andres out of the Spain, and IBM i is now and has been for a long time managed by a team of very clever women. We’ve got Winnie out there at the moment in Yan and Amy and the list goes on. … So IBM I, whilst computing still might be slightly a male thing, it’s never been from a management point of view, people who make decisions, there’s a nice liberal male, female split in there. So no, I don’t think they struggle with that.
Andy:
Okay, good. Beyond that-
Steve:
I’ll be honest with you, I don’t even think about it. And I think that was one of the reasons why it certainly took someone to say, “You would need to look at when you’re ranking people, not positive discrimination in any way, shape or form, but it had helped to actually find a few more women out there. And I know the other COMMON Americas have done something similar and they’re better represented. But what tends to happen is as you bring newer people on, the younger generation, there is more of a mix in this. I volunteer and teach in some local universities and when I look at the mix of the class in there now, it’s much more 50-50 as to boys and girls in there, men and women, gender is less of an issue. The world is realized-
Andy:
Was it just a matter of time before that kind of things kind of evened out.
Steve:
Or … Yeah, absolutely. I think the whole thing in STEM now, when it comes to the whole thing of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, that the people have realized what they want is the smartest person and gender and geography don’t come into it anymore. We’re used to people working from different parts of the world. We’re used to teams working remotely together and I think that’s helped break down this barrier of I’m not just looking for someone who looks like me, middle-aged man. I’d love to say gray hair, but I have no hair at all. So I think we’ve become almost transparent to that. What you’re looking for is who is the best person? Who’s the smart person? And if you are smart, you don’t look at the color of someone’s skin, you don’t look at the gender, you don’t look at the religion, you don’t look at the politics.
You keep all of those things separate and you say, Do I plus this person’s judgment when it comes to database or do we design and you pick the best person for the job.
Andy:
It’s easy to judge someone by surface level things, but take some effort to dig deeper and really understand their capabilities.
Steve:
Imagine if we were doing this interview now without video one and you were just taking me just based on the way my voice sounded. I mean, it’d be totally different from the conversation without. You would assume you were talking to Richard Geer or Richard Burton. Being serious, you draw different conclusions and if this was just a text-based one so you didn’t even know my gender, you were just getting back hopefully what you considered to be reasonable answers. You think, okay, I can work with this person. So I think we have to break some of this human nature where we look and look for people who look like us that we should work with. That’s BS. The future does not go that way.
Andy:
Definitely. Yeah, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunity that way too.
Steve:
Huge potential.
Andy:
Yeah. Do you have another five or 10 minutes?
Steve:
I have as long as you want. I can do another 20 or even an hour if you want.
Andy:
Okay. Well, we’re about a month away from Common Europe, Congress 2026 I think at Lyon, France. And I’m just curious, we met at PowerUp about a month ago in New Orleans and I’m really curious about what … And I think you’ve been to a couple PowerUps so far, right?
Steve:
That’s right. So I’ve only been to two PowerUps. I’ve been doing this for 38 years and last time that I looked, there were close to 60 different COMMON-like IBM i user groups, if you will, around the world. And I’ve probably been at about 20 different of those organizations. And I mean 20 conferences. I do like 10 conferences in a year easily, sometimes twice that. I organize four of my own in the UK. And so there are certain things that I can see that are common from … And that’s common with a small c. We have in common around the world IBM i people around the world tend to be very, very similar. And I’ll tell you what, it’s good news because they tend to be very, very good. And I don’t know whether it’s a really nice platform in IBM i that brings nice people or the nice people that made the nice platform that is IBM i, but I’m grateful either way, right?
Because I can go over to POWERUp in the US and just talk to anybody. I mean, literally, I mean anybody. I don’t even need to introduce myself, not because I’m in any way famous, just because IBM i people just like to talk. And I guarantee you if you were … Are you coming to Lyon?
Andy:
Well, unless we can make some last minute arrangements, no.
Steve:
Let me just imagine from a moment that you were, right? So you’re coming over to Lyon and you’re thinking, oh my God, I’m going to France. I’m surrounded by people I don’t know in an area I don’t know at all. I assume all of those things are true. And there’ll be people from 30 different countries there speaking a whole mess of different languages. And then the moment they’ll go, “Oh, you’re new to this? Let me tell you about my experience.” And they’ll tell you about Lyon and they’ll tell you about their hobbies and they’ll tell you about their IBM i stories and then I guarantee you that it’s going to be, “Let’s go and get some coffee. I find this great little petition around the corner.” This thing is a family atmosphere that goes way beyond technology and Lyon will be like that. I think we’ve been to Lyon before, but I’m absolutely sure of that. I’ve been to many, many different conferences in France.
And the last one I was in September last year, not only did I have a great time talking about IBM security down in Montpellier, I went to the beach with them afterwards and we were drinking wine watching the sunset go down. I went up a hike up a nearby mountain. I didn’t realize it was a mountain. I thought it was a hill when I was setting off, but they supported me there and back and made sure I made it back to my hotel. I’ve been taken on all sorts of sightseeing tours around the world, but I also love the fact that when I go to a different location, they use IBM i in a different way. The guys in Denmark, they’re famous for their furniture.
They’re also famous for their Lego. And you see these massive construction sites. You maybe go into the north Scandinavians and you’ve got some oil refineries using it. You come into Luxembourg and there’s banking using it. Same in my own London. So the different geos, Italy in particular where they’ve just got thousands and thousands of people who use these tiny boxes to do just about everything from manufacturing clothing to shipping lottery tickets. It seems to be in every part of the world. So what I find is that no matter which of these conferences I go to, no matter what continent, and I’ve done this in Moscow and I’ve done this in America and I’ve done this in 10 different European cities, the people are always super friendly. They’re interested in IBM i, but they’re also interested in you as an individual, which is awesome.
Andy:
Is that because it’s kind of a niche platform? I mean, I know it’s big and in everything kind of, but-
Steve:
It’s okay to be niche. It’s okay to be niche. So yeah, we have many tens of thousands, probably a hundred thousand different organizations with 10 times that have different servers and 100 times that have LPARS. So there’s a lot of it out. It’s a multi-billion dollar business, but we’re not Android phones. There aren’t eight billion of them on the planet. So if you’re going to compare us to the broadest IOT devices or smartphone devices, we are niche. We’re in the hundreds of thousands. I’m sure millions have been sold over the years because we’ve been doing this for almost 40 years, but nothing like the size and scale of a Samsung or an Apple. And you know what? It’s okay to be niche. Which would you rather be? Would you rather be that e-bike that everybody has or would you rather be a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley or a Porsche?
I mean, pick your luxury vehicle of choice. I want to hitch my wagon and say, look, I know I want to work in a more niche environment with a higher quality product where everybody knows one another. Yeah, this is great. Cheers. I want to be where everybody knows my name.
Andy:
Right. (crosstalk)
Steve:
It is that pride and maybe that’s what you’re touching on. So why is it nice? It’s because people are actually happy in their jobs. They’re not worried that by going to this event someone will either undermine them or steal their customers or steal their trade secrets. No, quite often it’s the opposite. I’ll go there and with people who are in my competition in my day job and I’ll talk about some of the problems they’ve got and they could probably work out which customer I’m talking about and they could take advantage of that if they wanted to, but they don’t. They tend to say, “Hey, have you considered doing this? Because that’s how I solved that problem last time.” It’s a very cooperative environment where people buy from people and they’ve got these long-term relationships with their clients. So I think that’s probably what it is, is that we’re all actually really just happy about the choice we’ve made and grateful that we’re not working on a Microsoft platform.
Andy:
I imagine when you’re talking to someone and maybe even sharing something that could give them a competitive advantage, you’re probably also thinking long term, I want to have a good relationship with this person and just because that’s nice in and of itself, but also maybe five years down the road because we did develop that trust, maybe we’re working on something together at some point.
Steve:
100%. I have a mentor, one of my first bosses in IBM, a guy called Malcolm Jones. Malcolm always used to say to me, “You always give the advice that you would give to yourself based on what you would know. ” Don’t try and in any way manipulate or benefit from the relationship, because at some point they will realize the value of the advice you gave. And if they realize it’s good, then there’s a good chance they’ll come back. So you sow the seeds now based on decency, reasonably, morality, what you would do based on your own knowledge and then trust in the fact that they’re going to come back to you. And if they don’t, that’s fine. You probably don’t want that sort of person as a customer anyway. So I’m lucky, a little bit of luckiness. I joined a small organization when I first started back in 1988, same year as the platform.
And over the next 18, 19 years, that grew to about one and a half thousand people. And then I decided that I wanted to go back to a small platform. So I started my own business, Rowton IT where I work now. And I work with 12 people and I know the names of everyone’s partner, child, often mother, definitely two of their dogs are in the office right now. We’re a family. And when one of us has a problem, you don’t have someone going “Told you so.” You have someone saying, “How can I help?” And I love that sort of environment. I love creating the next generation of that. And I think IBM i is like that all the way through. People love to help one another rather than shoot one another down.
Andy:
Yeah. And that’s the thing that is happening at these conferences, especially common Europe Congress.
Steve:
Coming up. And if I can talk a little bit about the benefit of Common Europe over some of the others, right? So if I compare it to my own sort of user group, we get 150 people there and we’ll have two day sessions and there’ll probably be a choice of 30 things for people to pick from. Okay. Well, we’re going to COMMON Europe. Now we’re going to go a little longer. So we’re going to have like a four day conference because people are going to travel further to get there and you’ll have a choice of several hundred things to choose from. There’ll be more than probably a hundred different presenters delivering probably 250, 300 different sessions on all aspects of IBM i. So if you’re a system administrator, you’ll have plenty to pick from. If you’re a database person, plenty to pick from. Security, AI, storage. Adjacent technologies like Linux and AIX, there’ll be a number of tracks on those, personal development tracks.
Much like your own POWERUp where you’ve got more tracks that make you a whole better person. So where you can learn about your core skill, but also you can learn a bit about adjacent skills to yours. This is where common Europe really comes into its own. You got people coming from all across European. They come across all across the planet. We’ll have people from India there, we’ll have people from America there, plenty of different European languages there. I wish we could get someone from the Antarctic, but they just don’t return our calls.
And people will come there together to learn, to network and to make bonds, but there’ll be a really big choice. So that’s the nice thing about COMMON Europe. It’s like our local user groups, but on steroids, much like your own POWERUp. I love going to power up because when you have 10 times as many people there as I have in my organization, I can’t speak to everybody, but I can feel the energy from everyone being there. So it’s nice to be in a parade. I hope you made it to the end with the second line parade where we literally closed the streets and the police drove us through the streets.
Andy:
I missed that one. We were done before that happened. Oh, you missed that. I saw the video. I saw some video. I saw yours.
Steve:
Absolutely. It was awesome. Can you imagine you’ve got outriders closing the streets, running on the motorcades down to close the lights off so we can march through with a New Orleans band. I mean, where else are you going to get to do that? It’s just awesome.
Andy:
I can’t imagine anywhere else.
Steve:
And so with COMMON Europe, what do we have over the conference in America? Well, I’m going to be slightly sarcastic, right? It’s a slightly tongue in cheek, but the food we have in Europe is amazing. So if you want better wine and cheese, come to COMMON Europe. Listen, I know that’s a little bit sarcastic, but the great thing about moving it around Europe is you get these incredible delicacies just as we got great New Orleans food and a POWERup. Well, just imagine now you’ve got fine cheese that’s French and it’s local and it’s seasonal and they’ll match the wine with it. It’s just amazing. If I take you to a COMMON Denmark event, you get a different type of wine with each course that the wine is matched the course that you have. Wow. We really take our food quite seriously in Europe.
Andy:
You guys do it up over there.
Steve:
Yeah, for sure. So definitely worth coming along to a COMMON Europe event because there’s excellent education opportunities. There’s excellent networking opportunities, but also there’s these things where you get the chance to learn about the local culture. They’ll take everybody out and they will take them to some local cultural field and give them a real sort of experience of what that’s like. I mean, over the years I’ve been to recycles in opera houses. I’ve been to incredible libraries. I’ve been to museums and you can just sort of see the things that are happening there. And these are very large places where you say museum, you think I’d be really dull, but the Museum of Solidarity when we were over in Poland, this is where all the peace accords were actually signed and you saw that one of the big actions that actually changed and brought about the end of the Cold War, and then you got to have a drink next to it some excellent wine and some very interesting rock music from the shipyards after that.
You just get culture that you would never knew existed in a very safe way while still learning about IBM I and broadening your own horizons. So it’s super cool.
Andy:
Information, education, camaraderie, community and culture.
Steve:
You build friendships for life. Absolutely. You’ll meet some of these people and maybe, let’s just say for a moment you did come along to Leon and you think this is so good. I’m going to come back with my family. You’ll meet two or three people there that are locals and they’ll give you the numbers, your email address and say, “If you’re coming back, tell me when you come in. I will give you a personalized iterian that says you need to do X, Y, and Z.” And I’d be very surprised if one of them didn’t offer to actually meet you for a coffee and give you a personal tour, make sure that if anything went wrong, you’ve got someone who knows the locale, that has happened to me time and time again.
Andy:
Well, that sounds like a lot of fun. I’m sorry. I probably won’t be there this time, but maybe 2027, but I can
Steve:
Tell you- 2027 will be fun. That’ll be in Antwerp. And maybe even in 2028, it’ll be in the UK. It hasn’t been decided yet, but that’s definite maybe. So that could be fun. We could help you with a language barrier.
Andy:
Yeah, right, exactly. Well, this has been great. It’s been great to hear about CEAC and kind of what you all are talking about there and the ideas that bubble up and the trends you discuss and all of that. It’s a great little peek behind the curtain for me anyway, so I really appreciate that.
Steve:
No problem. A lot of these CEAC members and indeed CAC members as well, they are also speakers so they’ll be at the COMMON Europe event. I don’t seem to get a choice. Many of the others don’t either. Someone says, “You’re going? Great. I’ve put you down for a session.” So that’ll be me this time. I’ll be talking about Navigator with Tim Rowe.
Other things that we get called in to help with is that we also sit on advisory council, so outside of the CEAC now, but helping IBM with the development of Navigator, ACS, BRMS, Bob, VS Code, all of those things have groups that are a combination of IBMers and non IBMers, not just CEAC members. I mean, there’s members of the, specialists from across the world, but a lot of ICAC is tend to have a secondary thing that they help out with. I’m on my second Redbook this year because I keep forgetting to the word no, but it’s good fun, you kow.
Andy:
Say yes to everything, huh?
Steve:
Well, that’s my view on it. Let’s just go with it and see where it takes us.
Andy:
That’s a good way to get into adventures.
Steve:
One of the things I know that you and I said we might talk about was one of the differences in the priorities for people generally in Europe versus in the US. And so there’s a couple of differences. I’ve said how common we are and the people are the same, but we have a few different challenges. And so if we talk about the Americas. I would say that language is less of an issue there. Now there’s not saying there’s only one language spoken in America, but if I was to say typically there are four big languages, sort of English, Spanish, Portuguese, maybe French, if I take the Americas as a whole. Within Europe, we’re dealing more like 15 languages and all of our languages unlike have lots of special characters in them, which make it really challenging for an operating system that’s been around for as long as it has with an episodic code base to deal with the umlauts … the accents, the special little characters that make out European names.
So language is a real difference for us. That’s super important because we spend a lot of time testing that to make sure it works. So that’s one element. The other element that tends to be different is that we are in Europe tends to be in our smaller business more heavily regulated by compliances than the US. So obviously large organizations, banks, whatnot, they’ve got all their compliance, their SOX compliance or what have you, or HIPAA or what have you. But the small organizations, your startups over there tend not to be. Well, ours are.
Now California might be different, but everywhere in Europe or anyone who trades with Europe has to do with the GDPR, right? And this is this incredible security thing that if you get it wrong, you can be fined from within an inch of your life. So 14% of your entire turnover, it can destroy a business. So we’re really much more conscious about looking after our data and looking after our people. People isn’t a bit of a difference. In the Americas, it tends to be that you can hire and fire very easily. Europe, that’s not the case. If you take somebody on, then you have this responsibility and it can take quite some time and a lot of money to no longer employ that person. So you don’t employ lightly and you want to make sure you get the most out of your people. So there’s two big challenges.
And the third big challenge, and this is doubly so for people from the United Kingdom, is the cost of electrical power. So electrical power, the vaults and watts that we put into power our machines. The cost for me in the UK is double what it is in Europe. And so I pay twice as much for my electricity as the people in Europe do, because some of the choices we made and the way we do our taxes, I pay probably five times more than you in the US for my energy. So we need computers that actually are efficient to run electrically as well as from a human point of view to make sure that we can actually be competitive. So if I do the comparison now, not with electricity, but with gasoline, so in the UK, if I do my conversion, we buy in liters. So if I just let them obviously pay in pounds, but let me convert it to American dollars. If you were buying some gasoline in the UK today, then you’d be just a little north of $10 per gallon, which if you were buying diesel, it’d be more like 14.
And so I know it varies across the US, but we’re sometimes-
Andy:
There would be riots.
Steve:
There would be riots. I mean, even I heard when it hit $8 in California, which is one of your highest areas, people were really unhappy about that. Guys in Michigan is still paying $3 and I’m paying four times that right now and that’s a fact of life for me.
Andy:
Yeah. You’re not complaining, I guess, right?
Steve:
It’s kind of- Well, yeah, I would if someone would listen, but my point is that we have to factor in the cost of running things and so we need our Power servers to be very electrically power efficient as well as logically power efficient.
Andy:
And it seems like they kind of do get more energy efficient with each iteration.
Steve:
Every single one and that’s why I bring it up because we in Europe have been pushing that agenda for more than a decade now. And the US is now going to appreciate that because we have this super dense data centers that you guys are building as well. Even your cheap power, the challenge there wasn’t money; it was about how much you could put into a building. So making them more electrically efficient means that you can actually get more out of your data centers.
Andy:
You guys are making things better for us. Like with the iPhone, with the USB-C connector, I think it was Europe that made that happen.
Steve:
For the win, absolutely. We just said stop this. There is no need for there to be lots of different charges. Now my laptop charger charges my phone, charges my headphones. It’s a better world out there.
Andy:
So it’s funny, it’s the little things, right? Just like the F8 key.
Steve:
Exactly right, sir. Yeah. Sometimes the little things … Yeah. And what evolution is in modernization, modernization and evolution, there are a series of small steps. It’s those little things. If we can carry on doing lots of little things better, the world will be a better place.
Andy:
Well, it’s also important just to pause and take a step back and take stock of what’s going on. I think that’s a little bit of what we did here today. So thank you so much, Steve, for doing that. I don’t know. Was there anything else we didn’t cover that we were-
Steve:
Oh, listen, let’s call it pause it there. There’s nothing else we need to talk about today, but I’d love to talk to you another time solely about what we’re doing in the UK with the i-UG, but also the way we’re actually working inside universities teaching people IBM i right now with our Ignite program.
Andy:
Let’s do that. Let’s put that on the calendar.
Steve:
Yeah. But for the point of this, I hope you do get to go to COMMON Europe. I hope that anyone who gets to listen or read to this goes to COMMON Europe. If you go there, I’ll leave you with one last thought. So you’re going to spend some money going there, probably the equivalent of one to two days of a consultant’s time. So if you could learn enough in a 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. Well, I guarantee you won’t save two days. I guarantee that with the connections you’re going to make, not only will you actually get free consultancy worth more than two days. You’ll have people you can call up afterwards for free and say, “Look, I know that you’re the specialist in …” Let me pick VTLs, for example, because you were right by a VTL guy in PowerUp and you wanted to ask some questions about how you would work with a VTL.
You’d get some free consultancy afterwards because that person knew who you were. Now, I’m sure they would hope one day that you would buy from them, but it’s the same with security, it’s the same with database. You make these contacts, you’ll get not only free consultancy, but you’ll get a free consultant that you can ask a favor of. No, after a while, it’d be nice if you gave them some money, but definitely makes it pay for itself.
Andy:
But
Steve:
Definitely makes it pay for itself. You’ll get enough free advice and connections there afterwards that’s going to make it pay for itself. It will be a zero sum cost in the end.
Andy:
Nice.
Steve:
Go to common Europe.
Andy:
Pay the money and be active and meet a bunch of people and I guess you get all of it what you put in, so I have to assume so.
Steve:
100%. Yeah. Just go and talk to everybody. What the heck do you do? It’s a great start.
Andy:
Yeah. I mean, there’s a built-in icebreaker for everything.
Steve:
It’s exactly what I did when I walked up to your counter that started this conversation, you and a colleague
Andy:
Was
Steve:
There. Okay. I said, “I’ve heard the name, but what is it you actually do? Tell me. ” Great.
Andy:
Yeah, I’m glad that connection happened. So this has been a lot of fun.
Steve:
Well, I hope we get to speak again, Andrew. I appreciate that.
Andy:
Absolutely. We’ll talk later for sure.
Steve:
Take care. All
Andy:
Right. Take care. Bye.