What a year 2025 was for IBM Z Advocacy!
2025 wasn’t just a big year for IBM Z Advocacy — it was the year we transformed how advocacy is recognized, rewarded, and scaled.
So many incredible acts of Advocacy, community engagement and incredible results for IBM, our clients and partners! We created opportunities, organised events, our advocates were speakers, mentors, organisers - all of it was a true showcase of the power of building a community together!
In the background, the team was also working hard on something special - our new and improved IBM Z Advocacy Hub vNext!
We launched on IBM Z Day - November 12th 2025 and introduced our easy button on all things Advocacy!
What changed?
- Our Advocates can now register and create their Advocate profile - a single page for everything they need on their Advocacy journey
- Advocates now have a single place to see their impact, track progress, and discover opportunities tailored to what they care about - their personal Advocacy dashboard
- Our badge requirements also changed - we introduced a new, easy to read point system, where each badge corresponds to amount of points - not only simplifying our approach but also creating some healthy competition amongst our Advocates
- Speaking of healthy competition - we created our Leaderboard - the more points our registered Advocates earned in Q4, the higher up they ended up on the Leaderboard! Just look at the incredible results we were able to accomplish in just 1 month:
A huge thank you to all of our IBM Z & LinuxONE Advocates for their efforts!
- We updated our Badges and Learn more (FAQ) pages to ensure clarity of process, changes and everything our Advocates may have questions on
- We introduced our Federated Advocates (our IBM Internal Advocacy program for our employees) to the platform, making sure we are consistent in our approach
We achieved some incredible results with the launch of our platform with 197 Registered Advocates and 352 reported acts of Advocacy reported through our new IBM Z Advocacy Hub in just 30 business days! None of this would have been possible without our incredible Advocates and this strong community!
So what's next in 2026?
We are not stopping here, we have some exciting things planned for 2026.
- We have already reset our Leaderboard for Q1 of 2026 so now is the time to start doing your Advocacy acts and submitting them through the platform - get your name on that top 5 list!
- We are constantly improving the IBM Z Advocacy Hub with new features and content - we are working on having notifications and daily digests for all of our Advocates, giving even more clarity on the status of their Advocacy acts, updates on their progress and even more customised content!
- We are working on exciting new opportunities and content our Advocates can take advantage of!
- We heard your feedback! You said you wanted to take your Advocacy journey even further, so we created our new IBM Z & LinuxONE Community Superstar badge - a way of recognising our true Advocacy superstars and giving them the opportunity to continue their Advocacy journey!
New to the program?
Register on the IBM Z Advocacy Hub today, create your profile, and start earning points with your first act of advocacy.
Already registered?
The Q1 2026 Leaderboard is live — submit your advocacy acts now and claim your spot in the Top 5.
Join us in a celebration of our incredible achievements in 2025 and our excitement for an even more incredible 2026! 🎉