POWERUp 2025 –Your Source For IBM i 7.6 Information
May 12, 2025 Alex Woodie
The IBM i community is getting ready for the biggest event of the year, the COMMON Annual Conference, better known as POWERUp 2025. The event, which is being held next week at the Disneyland Hotel in Southern California, is chock full of information relating to IBM i 7.6, the latest release of the operating system.
It seems like just yesterday the IBM i community was convening on Fort Worth, Texas, for what would be one of the largest and most positive COMMON events in recent memory. In particular, IBM and COMMON were successful in attracting a substantial contingent of the youth vote, which is seen as a vital link to bridge the IBM i platform into the future. It also cracked the 1,100 attendee mark, something COMMON hasn’t done in more than a decade.
Now the user group, which is celebrating its 65th birthday, must try to follow up that successful Fort Worth event with next week’s show in downtown Anaheim, California. The setting is the iconic Disneyland Hotel, which has been home to two other POWERUp conference in the past 10 years.
The Chicago, Illinois, user group has a helpful tailwind in the form of IBM i 7.6, the first new release of the operating system in three years. IBM i 7.6 has been shipping for less than a month, which means the IBM i masses are likely hungry for information about it. What better location to learn about the new IBM release than “The Happiest Place on Earth?”
The POWERUp 2025 schedule shows a lot of IBM i 7.6 content on the docket. The esteemed architectural duo (and sometime comedy troupe) of Tim Rowe and Scott Forstie will kick things off at 10 a.m. PT Monday morning with a session titled IBM i 7.6 by the Architects. Tim Mullenbach, the IBM i security business architect, will host a session on the extensive security enhancements in IBM i 7.6 at 11:15 a.m. PT. Mullenbach will follow that up with a deep dive on the new time-based one-time passcodes (TOTP) used in IBM i 7.6’s new multi-factor authentication (MFA) facility at 4:30 p.m. PT.
On Tuesday, May 20, Mullenbach will be back with a session titled IBM i Integrated MFA Solution at 9:15 a.m. PT. Forstie (the database architect) will lead a session titled What’s New in Db2 for i at 10:45 a.m. IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will and Kisco Systems Senior Advisor Carol Woodbury will talk about the roots of IBM i security enhancements in a session titled IBM i Security: A Dual Responsibility that takes place at 5:05 p.m. PT.
MFA will be back on the schedule at 9:15 a.m. on Wednesday, May 21, when Mullenbach leads a session titled IBM i Integrated MFA Solution Developer Impacts. Mullenbach will also host a repeat of the Monday deep dive on TOTP at 10:45 a.m. PT. Tim Rowe will host a sessions called Administering the new MFA Support on IBM i at 5:00 p.m. PT.
Thursday will bring a pair of IBM i 7.6-related COMMON sessions, including Navigator for i – An Administrator’s View, which is hosted by Ann Wilkerson and scheduled to take place at 11:15 a.m. PT, while Steve Bradshaw will host a session titled “Things i-Lve about IBM i 7.6” at 4:45 p.m. PT.
And while IBM didn’t include the new watsonx Code Assistant for i in the latest round of enhancements, we are expecting news for this RPG coding copilot to come out of the show. CTO Will and Edmund Reinhardt are hosting two co-pilot sessions on the new AI product, including IBM watsonx Code Assistant for i Overview on Monday at 3:15 p.m. PT, and IBM watsonx Code Assistant for i – How it works and demos at 8:00 a.m. PT on Tuesday.
All told, POWERUp 2025 will include more than 310 sessions by more than 120 speakers across four days of education. There are too many worthwhile sessions to list here. Needless to say, whether you’re looking for information on hardware, software, RPG development, Web development, AI development, open source, closed source, security, networking, storage, performance, backup, recovery, high availability, continuous availability, moving to the cloud, moving off the cloud, reporting, analytics, change management, IoT, or career development, there’s something for everyone at the show.
And of course there is the POWERUp Expo hall, where you can learn about the IBM i solutions from dozens of vendors, pick up some shwag, schmooze with your favorite sales folks, or have a bite and a drink. Going to a COMMON show remains a rite of passage for the IBM i faithful, and this year’s conference looks to be shaping up as a good one.
If you haven’t registered for POWERUp 2025 yet, there is still time. Provided you get yourself to Anaheim, you can register at the front desk. We’ll see you at the show!
RELATED STORIES
Youthful IBM i Optimism In Fort Worth
IBM i Education Goes a Mile High at COMMON’s POWERUp 2023
A Common Market, A Common Currency, A Common Theme
