IDUG EMEA 2026

Db2 for z/OS remains the foundational repository for the world's most critical transactional and analytical enterprise data. However, organizations face an operational crossroads: the compounding complexity of modern enterprise workloads is colliding with a skills shortage as veteran Db2 systems professionals retire. To safeguard these critical data environments without escalating operational risk, Db2 management should go beyond legacy green-screen friction into an intelligent, web-native ecosystem. This session explores the integration of Generative AI (Gen AI) with Broadcom CenterStage^TM for Database Management, specifically optimized for Db2 on z/OS environments to aggressively bridge this widening skills gap.

Modern Db2 environments generate enormous amounts of operational data but turning that information into meaningful action remains a challenge. DBAs often spend valuable time determining what needs attention, understanding why performance patterns are changing, and prioritizing operational work.

This session demonstrates how Runtime Insights helps transform operational data into actionable intelligence. By providing visibility into workload behavior, usage patterns, and evolving application activity, Runtime Insights enables teams to move beyond reactive monitoring and make more informed, proactive decisions.

Attendees will learn how operational insight can be used to identify emerging trends, better understand application behavior, uncover optimization opportunities, and prioritize actions based on actual usage data rather than assumptions. We'll also examine how real-time business intelligence serves as a critical foundation for AI-enabled experiences, helping organizations combine trusted data, analytics, and domain expertise to support faster and more confident decision-making.

Whether your goal is improving performance, optimizing resources, or preparing for the future of AI-driven operations, this session will demonstrate how Runtime Insights helps turn working data into strategic advantage.

Attendee Takeaways

- Learn how Runtime Insights exposes workload and application behavior patterns.
- Discover ways to prioritize tuning and optimization activities based on actual usage data.
- Understand how operational intelligence supports proactive database management.
- See how Runtime Insights contributes to a trusted foundation for AI-enabled operations.

As enterprise architectures rapidly evolve, the database can no longer just be a passive repository for structured data—it must be an active, intelligent, and hyper-secure platform. Join us for an inside look at how the IBM Db2  engineering and product teams are fundamentally rebuilding the engine to tackle the defining technology shifts of the next decade: the rise of generative AI, the demands of cloud-scale data lakes, and the looming reality of quantum computing risks.

In this forward-looking strategy and deep-dive session, we will explore:

• AI for Developers: How Db2 is removing architectural friction to building the next generation of AI apps and services without ever moving your data.
• AI for Human Productivity: A look into how next-generation AI-driven database management and automated optimization are transforming DBA workflows, slashing operational overhead, and turning complex troubleshooting into autonomous tuning.
• Cloud-Scale Data Ecosystems: How IBM continues to invest in cloud scale to ensure Db2 is omni-present across all hyper scalers.
• Quantum-Safe Cryptography: Why modern security requires acting now to combat "harvest now, decrypt later" threats, and how Db2’s native integration of GSKit 9, FIPS 140-3 compliance, and post-quantum algorithms (ML-KEM) secures data for decades to come.

Whether you are looking to accelerate your organization’s AI adoption, optimize massive hybrid-cloud topologies, or harden your data infrastructure against future cryptographic threats, this session will provide the strategic roadmap and practical technical foundation you need to build what’s next.

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.

Managing a complex Db2 for z/OS environment requires efficiently moving from seeing raw data to gaining actionable insights. This session examines how organizations are leveraging modern dashboards to streamline traditional DBA analysis and troubleshooting. We will explore real-world customer use cases that focus on core operational needs: maintaining real-time situational awareness of system health, rapidly isolating locking conflicts during issue investigations, and proactively tuning resource allocations like buffer pools. You will also get a glimpse into how Broadcom’s native, in-house built dashboards can help you quickly flag systemic issues and optimize overall subsystem performance. Join us to share your perspectives, collaborate with fellow DBAs, and help us refine the next generation of Db2 tooling.

zDBA, Z Database Administration for Db2 for z/OS, refers to the specialized practice, role, and tooling involved in managing and maintaining IBM Db2 for z/OS, a premier relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs on the high-performance IBM Z mainframe platform.

IBM Db2 Genius Hub is an AI-powered data management console designed to turn IBM Db2 LUW into an autonomous database platform. Released by IBM, it serves as the unified, intelligent operational layer that completely replaces the older Db2 Data Management Console and Db2 Intelligence Center.

This PSP will provide details of each product.

Organizations are eager to apply AI to improve mainframe operations, but many still struggle with fragmented information, inconsistent processes, and difficulty making expertise available when and where it is needed most.

This session explores how Db2 and IMS teams can turn operational data, performance history, and domain expertise into actionable guidance that supports faster problem resolution and more consistent decision-making. We'll examine why context matters, how organizations can reduce reliance on tribal knowledge, and what is required to make AI recommendations relevant, explainable, and useful in enterprise environments.

Through real-world examples, attendees will learn how operational intelligence helps teams improve resilience, accelerate onboarding, and make better decisions without sacrificing governance or human oversight.

Attendee Takeaways

- Reduce dependence on tribal knowledge by making expertise more accessible.
- Understand what makes AI recommendations trustworthy and actionable.
- Learn how operational intelligence supports resilience and faster problem resolution.
- Identify the governance and human-review practices needed for enterprise AI adoption.