The 2025 TechXchange Awards celebrate the brightest minds and most groundbreaking innovations in technology. These awards recognize outstanding achievements by individuals and organizations who drive transformative change across a wide range of disciplines.
Technical Excellence Award winners
Excellence in AI Agents
EY.ai for Tax: Detect and correct using business documents built with IBM watsonx
The Excellence in AI Agent Innovation Award celebrates the outstanding impact of agent-based solutions to transform workflows.
This award goes to EY for the creation of “EY.ai” for tax. Built with IBM watsonx, EY.ai uses business documents (contracts, PO’s invoices, tax forms) as the source of truth to detect and correct errors without altering the original documents. IBM watsonx business-trained models reduce hallucinations and improve accuracy, while built-in governance ensures data corrections are reliable, traceable, and compliant at scale.
Excellence in Application Modernization
Modernizing 3,600+ integrations across Kroger with Royal Cyber’s I2AC solution and IBM ACE
The Excellence in Hybrid Integration Award recognizes groundbreaking application modernization and seamless hybrid integration.
This award goes to Kroger and Royal Cyber for modernizing more than 3,600 legacy IIB v10 integrations to IBM ACE v12 using the I2AC automation tool. This hybrid migration ensures there is near-zero downtime and upgrades to Log4j2 improve observability, which results in a 50% ROI increase, 30% faster issue resolution, and 20% fewer errors.
Excellence in Data Management
Harley-Davidson Project CloudRider: Excellence in Db2 cloud management
The Excellence in Data Management Award celebrates exceptional innovation by treating data as a strategic asset to enable accurate insights and informed decisions.
The award goes to Harley-Davidson for Project CloudRider, a solution that modernizes and optimizes Db2 operations within a hybrid cloud environment. The project enhances performance and reliability, delivers consistent data excellence, and highlights how effective data management drives innovation and business success.
Excellence in FinOps
CXP Brasil redefining FinOps in Latin America
The Excellence in FinOps Award honors leadership and innovation in cloud financial management.
The award goes to CXP Brasil for redefining FinOps in Latin America. CXP Brasil is using IBM Turbonomic to shift clients like Elo and Nuvemshop from reactive cost control to proactive and intelligent cloud optimization. CXP Brasil also drives cultural change by uniting engineering and finance teams, embedding FinOps as a core discipline that empowers scalable operations with visibility, accountability, and confidence.
Excellence in Hybrid Cloud
Banking on cloud resiliency with GlassHouse Systems
The Excellence in Hybrid Cloud Award celebrates organizations that build intentional hybrid infrastructures, optimizing workload performance, efficiency, and data sovereignty. These solutions deliver the agility, speed, and integration needed for today’s business outcomes and future innovations.
This award goes to GlassHouse Systems for helping a leading bank modernize their disaster recovery using a hybrid IBM Cloud architecture setup with PowerVS and VCF, cutting failover time from 9 hours to 20 minutes. Their solution enables the shift to internal control, integrating HSM, SQL, and Db2 securely, with Cloud Pak for Data and watsonx, DR, analytics, and AI running in a compliant cloud.
Excellence in IBM Z and LinuxONE Innovation
Accenture creates the first systems integrator to set up WCA4Z on-prem on an x86 server
The Excellence in App Modernization Award recognizes leadership in hybrid integration and application transformation.
This award goes to Accenture for deploying IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z on OpenShift Container Platform hosted on bare-metal Fusion HCI machines. Featuring AI-driven tools for COBOL code understanding, refactoring, and transformation, the project significantly enhances productivity by automating environment setups and advancing code transformation capabilities.
Excellence in Open Source
University of Colorado paves the way for IBM AI and open-source enablement
The Excellence in Open Source Award celebrates those who fuel vibrant open-source ecosystems by enabling easy consumption and contribution with transparent governance.
This award goes to University of Colorado for integrating IBM tools such as OpenShift AI, watsonx, and Cloud with open frameworks like PyTorch, Hugging Face, Kubeflow, and JupyterLab across multiple universities. There are over 60+ students benefiting from this education, 5+ contributed upstream PRs, and two “code-for-good" open governance capstone projects focused on industry dashboards and language-learning bots.
Excellence in AI-Powered Automation
Revolutionizing operational efficiency through AI-driven automation with Verizon
The Excellence in AI-Powered Automation Award celebrates AI-driven insights and automation to optimize cost, value, and operational efficiency.
The award goes to Verizon for building a full gen AI stack in partnership with IBM watsonx to implement an Intelligent Operations Network Assistant. This initiative achieves a 30% reduction in mean time to repair, a 50% boost in developer efficiency, and 50% faster information access. This proactive IT culture transformation optimizes costs and accelerates innovation.
Individual Award winners
The following are the 2025 individual award winners:
Congratulations to all of our winners!
Congratulations to all our 2025 IBM TechXchange Awards winners for their outstanding contributions! Their dedication and leadership have set new standards for innovation and inspire technical practitioners everywhere to push the boundaries of what’s possible with IBM technology.
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