Meet three IBM Champions who are sharing knowledge, solving complex challenges, and helping grow New Zealand's technology community.
New Zealand might be one of IBM's smaller geographies, but it consistently punches above its weight when it comes to technical expertise, innovation, and community leadership.
That's exactly why I'm excited to spotlight some of the incredible IBM Champions who call New Zealand home.
Over the next few months, we'll be introducing you to Champions from across the country who are sharing knowledge, mentoring others, building solutions, and helping shape the future of technology in their fields. This is the first in that series.
First up: Diego dos Santos Rosa Pauletto, Darshit Pandya, and Matthew Hill.
Their specialties are very different. Their backgrounds are very different. But they all embody what being an IBM Champion is all about: learning continuously, sharing generously, and helping others succeed.
Diego dos Santos Rosa Pauletto: Learning, Building, and Sharing
As a Cyber Security Engineer at Spark, Diego works with HashiCorp Vault and Terraform, helping organizations approach cloud infrastructure with security, consistency, and automation in mind.
What stood out to me most in Diego's responses was his emphasis on community.
When asked what advice he'd give to new IBM users, he didn't jump straight to technology. Instead, he encouraged people to understand the broader ecosystem, connect with the community, and learn from practitioners solving real-world challenges every day.
That mindset has shaped his own career. One of his most impactful projects involved building an enterprise-scale landing zone using Terraform, an experience that pushed him to think beyond deployment and focus on governance, security, and automation for large teams.
His answer to what being an IBM Champion means may be one of my favorites:
I started learning, then building, and now I share while still learning. Basically a continuous journey with no final version.
Honestly, that captures the spirit of the program beautifully.
Darshit Pandya: Creating Better Experiences Through Simplicity
As Senior Principal Engineer, Platform, at Serko, Darshit works extensively with HashiCorp Terraform, Vault, and Waypoint, helping teams build secure, scalable platforms.
What I appreciate most about Darshit's perspective is his focus on creating practical, secure developer experiences.
In his work with Terraform, Vault, and Waypoint, he's focused on reducing operational friction and creating self-service experiences with strong guardrails. One of his boldest projects involved experimenting with patterns across these technologies to simplify workflows while maintaining security and consistency. That experience pushed him to think beyond infrastructure alone and consider developer experience as a product in its own right.
His advice for newcomers is refreshingly practical:
Start small, stay hands-on, and don't try to learn everything at once.
That's excellent advice whether you're learning Terraform, AI, analytics, or just about anything else.
Darshit also highlighted something we hear often from IBM Champions around the world: some of the most valuable learning happens through community conversations. He values opportunities to exchange ideas, discuss challenges openly, and learn from practitioners sharing their real-world experiences. For him, being an IBM Champion means contributing back through mentoring, speaking, and authentic knowledge sharing.
Matthew Hill: Turning Data Into Decisions
Matthew Hill, Director at Cortell and CorPlan, brings a different perspective to the IBM Champions community: helping organizations transform data into better business decisions.
His passion for IBM technology began when he saw how analytics could elevate organizations beyond simply reporting on what happened and toward proactively planning what comes next. By combining historical data, forecasting, AI, and what-if modeling, businesses can identify risks, uncover opportunities, and make smarter decisions faster.
When asked which IBM solution he couldn't live without, Matthew pointed to IBM Planning Analytics and its evolving AI capabilities. He's particularly excited about using Model Context Protocol integration to connect AI agents with planning environments, making it possible to retrieve insights and model scenarios using natural language prompts.
Matthew has also applied IBM technologies to solve some fascinating business problems. One of his boldest projects involved combining IBM Planning Analytics with SPSS and CPLEX capabilities to identify electricity theft in South America, a unique use case that demonstrated the power of analytics when applied to a real-world challenge.
Like Diego and Darshit, Matthew points people toward the community.
His advice to new IBM users is simple: take advantage of the wealth of resources, experts, content, and fellow Champions who are ready to help. He recently met with IBM product development teams focused on Data, Analytics, and AI and came away convinced that it's an exciting time to be working in this space.
A Community Worth Growing
Reading through these conversations, one theme showed up again and again: community.
Whether it's learning from practitioners, sharing lessons from real-world projects, mentoring peers, or helping organizations solve business challenges, each of these Champions sees knowledge sharing as part of the job, not an extra activity.
That's what makes the IBM Champions program special.
It's not about being the loudest voice in the room. It's not about having the biggest social following or collecting titles. It's about making a meaningful contribution to the communities, customers, and peers around you.
New Zealand already has an incredible community of advocates, technologists, architects, developers, consultants, and business leaders who are doing exactly that every day. These three Champions are wonderful examples of what's possible when expertise and generosity come together.
And we're just getting started.
Keep an eye on Linked In for the beautiful carousel posts featuring these stars and then over the coming months, we'll be introducing more IBM Champions from across New Zealand and sharing their stories.
If you're already speaking at events, mentoring others, creating content, sharing expertise, supporting customers, or helping technical communities thrive, you may be closer to becoming an IBM Champion than you realize. Take a moment to investigate, apply, and report activity to get started at ibm.com/champion
We're excited to continue growing this amazing community and discovering the next generation of advocates across New Zealand.
Maybe one day we'll be sharing your story, too.
Many thanks to @Sheldon Dargaville @JULIE MONETTE SUDFELDT for their work and support. Live in NZ and want to do more advocacy or get recognized for the contributions you're making? Get in touch with them!
Thanks to @Diego Pauletto @Darshit Pandya @Matthew Hill and look for more NZ Champions coming soon.
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