A few months ago I was invited to speak at IBM Z Forum in Australia. It’s an annual invitation-only, client-facing event where they bring in speakers from around the world to talk about topics of particular importance to the expected attendees. In my case, they were looking for someone who had given multi-arch talks with an IBM LinuxONE angle, as the rise of new hardware architectures and upcoming changes the platform had started piquing the interest of clients. As conversations progressed, it turned out that my ability to speak to open source on the platform made my presence doubly important.
I put together a talk that opened with the topic of hardware architectures and with a tour of notable features of the IBM LinuxONE hardware used by Linux, and concluded with a short section about open source on Linux on IBM Z. With that in hand, I was off to Perth! Upon arrival, I was met by my Australian colleague Adam LG Ring who would be my travel buddy for our journey across Australia and to New Zealand, and who joined me on my quest to find international postage stamps the first day I was in town.
This Z Forum tour was a pretty exceptional opportunity for me. Given my role, my interaction with clients is limited because I’m busy working behind the scenes on platform enablement. Travel-wise I tend to be out there working in open source software communities to meet these goals, and that means participating in open source software conferences. This trip was the first where my focus was on clients. In addition to what I shared in my talk, I was able to hear about pain points and start putting together strategies to tackle them and learn more about what they’re looking to get out of both Linux and IBM z/OS. Plus, they were excited about IBM Z and LinuxONE, and that’s always a great environment to be in.
Perth was a great start to the forum. It began with a meetup in a coffee shop with some partners where Adam and I gave out stickers, and continued upstairs as we spent the day in talks and chatting with clients. There was one client in particular whose enthusiasm for open source matched my own and she was telling me about some of the development their team is doing with open source tooling, and their process of going about finding s390x compatibility – definitely things I can help with!
Then we were off to Melbourne! This is a good time to mention how grateful I am to be working with the organizers of this event. Lukas Maly is the one who reached out to me initially and he helped me refine the messaging and also helped logistically as I went to book our complicated travel itinerary. Also there at every stop was Joyce Ng whose event expertise made the whole series of events feel flawless to speakers and attendees. Melbourne exemplified all this. I was also really thrilled to have IBMer Vic Cross was on this journey with us, as his hands-on experience with LinuxONE is one I’ve leaned on over the years and we got to have a bunch of really important conversations with him throughout was really valuable. We have some collaborative To Do items to tackle as a result upon our return home.
As with Perth, the day began with meeting some early career professionals, including the great Ashlee Jackson who manages the local New to Z chapter.
I was also surprised and delighted to meet Kathleen Keogh of Federation University Australia. Completely unrelated, we had spoken in the fall of 2025 to discuss what the possibilities were on the Linux side for installations. I gave some feedback and didn’t think much more about it, but it turns out they ran with it! A student team has worked with faculty to get the system online and they’re in the process of testing out some Linux distributions to run on it. Indeed, one of the sessions at zForum that day was from Samuel Shortal who took attendees through the sprints they’ve had so far that powered the system on and ran through some initial testing. So cool! I wish I had more time in Melbourne, I would have gotten the time to see their freshly booted system in person, along with the development system that the team at IBM is running. Alas!
My presentation was just after lunch, and right before one by Ben Thompson on the zopen Community tools. I’ve worked with the zopen community for a few years now, so it was a pleasure to meet Ben in person (and learn of our shared interest in amateur radio). The topic of modernization by way of the zopen tooling would come up a lot throughout our journey across the country, so it was great to have him there.
My Melbourne adventures didn’t end with zForum itself, as Adam had arranged a couple stops with universities the next day. The big one was a career event that drew nearly 100 students at the University of Melbourne. Ashlee joined us, as well as Geoff Nicholls, an IBMer who has spent his career on Z and is an alumni of the University of Melbourne. Meeting with students is always an energizing experience, and this one was exceptionally so. From folks looking to find their way, to those whose expertise in hardware in architectures was deeper than mine, the range of students and their enthusiasm was unmatched. I’m really glad I made time for this stop.
Our visit to Canberra was the shortest one, partially because Adam and I stayed a little extra long in Melbourne for the student events. It was a great event though, and this time held at an IBM office (rather than a hotel). Upon arrival I got to check out some of the vintage hard drives they have on display at the office and had some great conversations with some of the clients and partners in attendance. I learned that one of the partners does a lot of hobbyist 3d-printing and he sent over the STLs so I can print some little “Z” earrings, which we’ve queued up to print in time for me to give a bunch out at IBM TechXchange coming up in October. This event is also where it struck me just how many young people were at this event, and I remarked upon that. I learned later from our VP that it wasn’t a coincidence, one of our skills programs launched in Canberra, and their presence was a direct result of that effort. Nice work, team!
Sydney was up next! At another IBM office, I was quickly met by Ruth Bonser who I’d met a few years back at a TechXchange event, and she really left an impression. She leads up New to Z for all of Australia and New Zealand, coordinating presentations that rotate between groups across the region. And she knows everyone! It was a pleasure to briefly catch up again.
This stop on the forum also re-iterated the importance of open source on the platform, and it was really nice to sit with some clients to talk about it following my talk.
And then it was off to our final stop: Wellington, New Zealand. Like much of the trip, the weather was a bit gloomy, but it’s still a beautiful city. This is also the stop where I probably talked about LinuxONE the most in the hallway conversations. From the best use cases to generally the technical benefits of it, the potential of the system really sparked a lot of interest. I also enjoyed that during my talk I had some true Linux enthusiasts in the audience, so I’m very glad I included some of my own background with non-x86 architectures in my deck, because that opened up the door to geeking out over SBCs later.
With that, Z Forum came to an end and we all said our goodbyes. A final client meeting on Thursday morning book-ended the whole work adventure, and offered some lovely views of the harbor from the office.
These events really energized the work I do. It’s easy to get lost in the minutia of your day to day job and forget what you’re really doing it for. Making these connections and seeing the enthusiasm that was brought to the event gave me new ideas and made me feel like I was making an impact more than ever before. Now that we’re connected, I’m looking forward to continuing some of these discussions, even if I am in the wrong time zone ;)