IDUG EMEA 2026

Technology transforms organizations, but people determine whether transformation succeeds.

Drawing from two decades at the highest level of international sport, Ann Wauters explores what enables teams to perform consistently in environments where change, pressure and complexity are the norm.

Through inspiring stories and practical insights, she shares how trust, leadership, ownership and connection create the foundation for innovation, collaboration and sustainable high performance.

Because the strongest teams are not built on expertise alone—they are built on people who bring out the best in one another.

This session will be about bridging existing legacy programs with "modern"interfaces, such as the Unix shell and Ansible. Next-generation mainframers are typically well-versed in Unix shells and scripting, largely due to Linux's dominance in the server market. But how does this apply to traditional mainframe tools? That is what we want to show you.

In this session, I provide an inside look at how Db2 is used, operated, and evolved within SD Worx, a payroll/HR service provider, running running a mixed COBOL and .NET application landscape.
The presentation walks through the Db2 environment at SD Worx and illustrates real-world production workloads (with its struggles). We'll explore trends in Db2 growth, the impact of data integration (including the migration from IDMS), and how replication technologies are used to offload reporting, analytics, and decentral processing without impacting core workloads.
Special attention is given to Db2 Connect and connection management challenges in distributed .NET environments. Including real‑world P1 incidents (don't trust your distributed teams blindly!) and how to avoid them using Db2 Profiles, driver configuration and monitoring.Db2 Profiles are also used to regain control over legacy clients and get rid of the soon to be deprecated (and this time for real!) synonyms, which will be explained

Db2 for z/OS offers advanced capabilities to strengthen security management in distributed environments. This session discusses best practices for establishing secure connections including protected ID authentication using SSL, IDT, or trusted connection. This session also reviews the key system parameters that govern distributed access and discusses how system profile tables can be leveraged to enforce granular connection controls and secure TCP/IP connectivity.

Organizations are increasingly adopting real-time processing, event-driven architectures, AI-powered decisioning, and agentic automation. At the same time, many of the world’s most critical business transactions continue to originate on IBM Z. A single business activity—such as a payment, insurance claim, customer interaction, or account update—can generate signals across applications, transactions, data stores, and operational systems. While these signals are valuable, they are often disconnected and difficult to interpret in isolation. The challenge is no longer moving information between systems. The challenge is understanding what is happening in the business, in real time, and acting on it quickly.

IBM Z Data and Application Integration technologies, together with Confluent, address this challenge. Confluent provides the enterprise event backbone. IBM Z integration capabilities provide connectivity to IBM Z applications, transactions, data, and operational systems, enrich and correlate enterprise signals with business context, and simplify adoption through AI-assisted experiences. Together they transform enterprise signals into actionable business events that drive decisions, automation, analytics, and AI.

Db2 Distributed Data Facility (DDF) is the gateway to delivering business enterprise data in our modern world of cloud computing. DDF is widely exploited in the information technology space and this session aims to share best practices and success stories to optimize your business with DDF. Some of the topics includes, infrastructure, security, protecting data over the network, monitoring resources (threads/connections), sysplex workload balancing, and so forth. The objective of this session is provide you with practical, useful knowledge that you can take back to your work and manage DDF confidently.