IBM TechXchange Group

We love to celebrate and recognize our clients who make meaningful and significant contributions to their organizations and to the industry overall, and this year, we are very excited to introduce annual IBM TechXchange Awards to our IBM TechXchange program! 

Each year, the IBM TechXchange Awards program recognizes a special group of individuals who have demonstrated innovation and ingenuity. Their contributions are made throughout the year, and at the IBM TechXchange Conference 2024 in October, we will celebrate this year’s winners.

Celebrate with Us at the Awards Ceremony (in-person or virtual)

Join us for the IBM TechXchange Excellence Awards and Closing Ceremony from the IBM TechXchange Conference 2024 on October 24 at 3:00 to 3:45 PM PDT.

If you are attending the conference, then do join us in person. If you are unable to attend in person, the session will be livestreamed and we look forward to seeing you there instead!

How the Winners Were Selected

The awards are self-nominated or peer-nominated. The submissions are reviewed and assessed using a hybrid process that incorporates IBM TechXchange Community members. 

Each of the many submissions are first reviewed by an IBM Executive committee to determine the best of the best, resulting in 21 finalists, with 3 selections within each category.

These finalists are then voted on by the IBM TechXchange Community members so that the community has the final word in selecting the winners.

World-Wide Participation!

Before unveiling the winners, here are some interesting facts about our finalists and winners:

• The 21 finalists are from 14 different countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, UK, and US
• 7 of the 21 finalists are IBM Champions
• 3 of the 7 winners are IBM Champions
• Our 7 winners are from 7 different countries!

All the award categories and the winning submissions are described in more detail below, but first, let’s announce the winners.

Meet the Winners!

With a virtual drum-roll, here are our winners for 2024!

Descriptions of Award Categories and Winning Submissions

Excellence in AI at Work

This award recognizes teams who have demonstrated exceptional innovation and impact in applying AI-powered solutions, such as those from IBM watsonx to transform the way traditional work gets done, and describing how they are using AI technology in the workplace to improve productivity, streamline processes, and facilitate better decision-making. 

This award goes to Fabio Oliveria Guimaraes from Bank of Brazil for strategically advancing their AI endeavors within a Hybrid Cloud infrastructure employing IBM’s watsonx solution, on IBM Cloud, to monitor its on-premises AI models vigilantly. Their holistic approach ensures meticulous governance of AI models, harmonizing the advantages of Cloud and on-premises deployment.

Excellence in AI-driven Automation

It is predicted that by 2028, gen AI will create one billion cloud-native applications, with a focus on capitalizing AI-driven insights to optimize cost and value management, enhance operational efficiency, and enable intelligent decision-making through automation. This award recognizes transformational organizations that exemplify the journey towards becoming future enterprises by being more proactive and predictive, innovate more and maintain less, optimize more and firefight less, and lead rather than follow.

This award goes to Stephan Gerali from LockHeed Martin, where 200+ Data Stewards apply operations automation using IBM Orchestrate and Watsonx.AI solution which streamlines complex data cataloging processes, reduces manual labor, and delivers $3m cost savings by automating time consuming critical tasks such as data ingestion, metadata enrichment, generating column descriptions etc., resulting in faster response times and improved accuracy.

Excellence in Application Innovation 

Applications and integration are evolving rapidly as our business needs change, bringing the explosion of new applications and endpoints, and managing the complexity of these environments and achievieving scale through innovation is no easy feat. This award recognizes organizations that have demonstrated excellence in a hybrid integration, delivery of ground-breaking applications, and/or modernization of their application estate. 

This award goes to Thomas Gregg Faisis from Questronix Corp, who along with their Banking Client, Bank of Commerce, want to modernize their legacy core banking system to adapt to a highly competitive financial sector in the Philippines. Needing a future-ready and highly reliable system to support their chosen core banking application, this project required close coordination with the ISV, IBM, Red Hat, the client, and the Philippine Business Partner to plan, design, and deliver a LinuxONE-based solution with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Excellence in Hybrid Cloud 

Gen AI is just the latest innovation that places new demands on IT environments. For many, their cloud-first strategy has become a cloud-smart strategy where they design an architecture to connect and manage their applications and data across public clouds, private clouds, and on prem. This award recognizes organizations that have implemented an intentional hybrid infrastructure that enables them to optimize workloads for performance, efficiency, and data sovereignty and have built a hybrid cloud solution that gives them the agility, speed, and integration they need to achieve business outcomes today and be ready for the innovations of tomorrow.

This award goes to Youssef Largou from rKube for their rCloud solution which enables seamless workload management across cloud and on-premises environments. It offers IBM Power and LinuxONE as a service and CaaS via RedHat OpenShift, providing a hybrid multicloud solution. Already deployed by the largest cloud provider in Morocco, rCloud ensures efficient integration and scalability, addressing technical debt and system complexity while supporting continuous modernization and actionable insights. rCloud integrate IBM Cloud natively and uses Turbonomic and Aspera. See Youssef's blog on this topic here.

Excellence in Mainframe Innovation 

This award recognizes organizations that have demonstrated exceptional creativity and forward-thinking in leveraging IBM mainframe technology to drive innovation and growth and have successfully implemented groundbreaking solutions that have significantly advanced the capabilities and efficiency of mainframe systems, creating a path for future innovations.

This award goes to Rene De Vleeschauwer from Kobee who provides out-of-the box DevOps (CI/CD) and Toolchain Orchestration for z/OS, monitors the VCR (GIT) and will upon codebase change initiate compile and promote processes according to the life cycle of the project. The DevOps processes may run on IBM Wazi and production on the on-premise mainframe, integrating modern IDE’s with JIRA, GIT and IBM DBB, IBM Wazi Deploy and much more, with a plug and play implementation.  See Rene’s blog about this topic here.

Excellence in Open Source Contribution 

Open means choice. Open means more eyes on the code, more minds on the problems, and more hands on the solutions. A great way for an open source based technology to gain velocity and become ubiquitous is by welcoming new contributors, providing open governance and ensuring it is painless to both consume and contribute to the open source project. This award celebrates all aspects of activities that support and foster a project’s open source ecosystem. 

This award goes to Emma Skovgard from Dinoframe, for having demonstrated unprecedented creativity and taking the initiative to create a new platform for education around the IBM Mainframe technologies. This website is open to all contributors, meaning more four-eye checks check of each tutorial, more fingers on keyboards to create content, more creativity towards articles, and more people collaborating together! Everything is clear and intuitive so it's no surprise that this innovative project is growing fast and gaining velocity.

Excellence in Operational Efficiency/Supply Chain

In today’s dynamic economy, organizations are constantly challenged to do more with less and to meet external and internal stakeholders’ expectation. Forward-thinking organizations are finding new, better ways to use data and advanced technologies like AI, IoT, and analytics to achieve and exceed their operational goals. This award honors teams that have built solutions to enable more resilient and efficient business processes in the realms of physical asset management and supply chain operations.

This award goes to David Ganiford from British Antarctic Survey, who, with the assistance of their Maximo Partner Cohesive developed a bespoke cargo management system to cover the resupply of their polar operation, the system now means they can track all stages from physical count to receiving within Maximo. During the first week of rolling out the first phase of the system, their Supply Chain Logistics Team were able to remove 7 spreadsheets from the Cargo consolidation process alone, and reduce time taken to pack and document each package by 47%. See David's blog about this topic here.

For more details on this program, the finalists, and the winners, see our IBM TechXchange Awards page.

Sonia Singh

IBM TechXchange Advocate