What's our class of 2025 story?

We are now about a month into our time with the IBM Champions class of 2025, which you heard about in my launch blog. In that blog, I told you we invited more than 1400 individuals who were in the process of accepting their seats. 1431 Champions have now accepted their seats and we get to introduce you to those individuals in more detail. Of course, to meet them individually, start with their profiles on our home page - and then connect with them directly. But let's look now at the class as a whole and how the individual stories contribute to it.

As you can see in the infographic, our IBM Champions class of 2025 welcomes 36% brand new Champions and shows the loyalty of 64% returning (about 82% of last year’s Champions requested to renew). Across the program areas, 42% of are individuals who work for customer organizations and the class of 2025 lives and works in 66 countries around the globe. More than half of them earned advocacy badges on their path to becoming IBM Champions this year. And more than 300 list watsonx products in their skills or advocacy. 

The class of 2025 seems pretty exciting to me, by the numbers: strong advocacy, loyalty, AND new growth, plus expansion into more countries around the world. But what’s even more interesting than the numbers that describe the class is the innovation, engagement, and knowledge shared in their wide variety of contributions. Let me introduce you to just a few of the Champions through the contributions they shared with the selection committees.

Community contributions

Jon Peck returns as a Champion for 2025 as one of the most active members of the IBM TechXchange Community. Jon focuses on answering questions in the SPSS forum and was in the top 10 every month of 2024 for number of responses created. Others contributing similarly to discussions in the community include Robert Berendt, Art Kagel, Joseph Morgan, FJ Brandelik, Andrey Klyachkin, and so many others. 

Community engagement - both here on the IBM TechXchange Community and on other community sites - is one of the key indicators of an IBM Champion. Steven Perva and Mark Fry are great examples of those who support community on other platforms. Celia Gahagan, Chris Winston, and Heidi Schmidt are (a very few of many) great examples of those who support user groups. 

Overall in 2024, IBM Champions contributed across all community engagement types more than 24k times.

Content Creation

Kedar Shetye presented at the IBM TechXchange Conference and contributed technical articles on such diverse topics as lock/deadlock problems in Db2, MQ functions, and OS upgrades on a pureScale cluster.

Champions contributed nearly 42k examples of technical and thought leadership content in 2024, including articles and blogs, books and Redbooks, webinars and podcasts, and technical speaking sessions at conferences like IBM TechXchange.

Hundreds of the incoming and returning Champions create content, including Stephanie Neves, Simon Parkinson, Giulia Solinas, Jason Warman, Ina Nikolova, and so many more.

Developer, technical, and feedback contributions

One of our growth areas for 2025 is in developer-focused Champions, with 21% of our Champions having titles or contributions in developer activity, such as contributing code, sharing feedback, or promoting ideas to improve IBM products and open source technology.

Zoran Krleza contributed source code to UrbanCode Velocity plugin for integration with TektonCI on Openshift, for example.

Champions who contribute in this category also help write certification exams, are active in sponsor user programs, and support hackathons. Sébastien Julliand, Andrew Clark, Kohei Nishikawa, and Brandon Beals reported contributions like these.

How did we get here?

If you are familiar with the program, you might know that it launched in 2008 in the data area, with only 12 individuals. Nearly 20 years later, we still have a few of that original set in the program! The program grew in fits and starts for a few years, jumping to 50 people in year 2, and adding Champions from Power and collaboration software in year 4. By 2013, the program had grown by 19X.

The program has grown in two main ways through its history: by adding areas of technology, which brings in an influx of new advocates, and by adding individual advocates. Those individual advocates find the program thanks to rising visibility, more nominations coming in for new advocates thanks to IBMers and existing Champions, and integration with the community. We had a big bump in 2018, for example, when we welcomed the IBM Z, storage, and cloud areas to join the data and analytics, Power, and middleware/automation. Working with the IBM conferences and events teams and connecting the program to the community raised the program’s visibility again and resulted in the next big influx of people.

Another big bump happened in 2023, thanks to the program joining the IBM TechXchange mission and being embedded with the IBM TechXchange conference, regional events, and community. The conference gives IBM Champions an opportunity to shine, sharing technical expertise in speaking sessions and by hosting user group meetings. It also gives us the chance to bond with and lift up the Champions, building a tighter community and sharing more benefits. Finally the conference is an opportunity to recruit like-minded technologists to start doing advocacy and to walk the path to Champion. Add to that, having executive sponsors who understand and support the program allows us to grow, innovate, and offer new opportunities to Champions.

Launching the IBM Rising Champions advocacy badges has given us another way to motivate and help those interested in advocacy on their path to IBM Champion status. Advocates can apply or be submitted for a badge at any time during the year with only 2 acts of advocacy. We then help nurture, educate, and motivate them to continue along the path to becoming an IBM Champion.

All these benefits accrued to the program thanks to being part of the larger IBM TechXchange mission - and more benefits and growth continue, with added connections to learning and TechZone, benefits Champions want.

With 38% growth in 2024 and another 21% in 2025, the program has now grown almost 120 times larger than where we began. We have increased the visibility and eminence we’re able to offer to Champions, especially at the IBM TechXchange conference with the blue jacket phenomenon.

And yet, I think it’s vital to point out that the growth does not and has not come at the expense of the amazing contributions these advocates make. The program grew 38% in 2024, but the increase in advocacy contributions outpaced that, with a 56% growth to more than 66k contributions from sales references and case studies, to technical content creation, to supporting user groups and community, to the feedback and technical contributions that improve the products.

Where will we go from here?

It’s hard to imagine how and where we’ll grow from here, but as you might guess, the team has some ideas and lots of plans. In 2025, we’re focused on a few specific areas to ensure the program continues going strong:

• Meeting our IBM Champions where they are in the world and helping them make local connections to the IBMers and other Champions in their regions.

• Bringing as many of those IBM Champions as possible to our IBM TechXchange 2025 in Orlando, Florida, as speakers, attendees, and VIPs.

• Enhancing the benefits we offer to IBM Champions by working closely with our technical learning and certification teams, among others.

And we’ll be focusing on helping other customer-facing IBMers to recognize and nurture advocacy where they find it in the customers and partners they work with.

We’ll partner with IBM teams in markets around the world, and with all those who support advocacy at IBM, such as those in the IBM Z advocacy hub or skills programs, various customer boards and councils, sponsor user and feedback programs, and more. We’ll continue to work hand-in-hand with the user groups and community, and we’ll nurture and reward all those advocates we uncover through IBM Rising Champions advocacy badges. 

If you want to hone your advocacy skills along with us, join the IBM Advocacy call on March 26, where you’ll meet some of our advocates and get tips on creating the best session proposal possible. It’ll be just in time for you to submit session abstracts for the IBM TechXchange 2025 before the April 11 deadline.