By Marek Walczak, i-Rays

My connection with the IBM i ecosystem began in 1992 when I joined Bank Śląski right after graduating from university here in Poland. I took my first steps as a COBOL programmer working on the PABA application being implemented on the AS/400. A year later, the bank started the implementation of the ICBS system from FISERV, and I was reassigned to that project as the first member of the team responsible for deployments and for adapting the application to the realities of the Polish banking system. That’s how I became an RPG developer. 

Soon it turned out that due to its scale our implementation was unique for both FISERV and IBM. This required regular system benchmarking for each new stage of the rollout. As a result, I began spending weeks at IBM’s offices in Rochester, Minnesota, where winters can be harsher than in my home country. I had the honor and pleasure of participating in the entire multi‑year process of implementing and centralizing the system, eventually as the head of the core banking systems team. I really liked my job, and never in a million years would I have thought that I would leave the corporate world to start something of my own.

And then I went to my first COMMON event.

By coincidence, I was sent to a local COMMON conference in Salzburg, Austria, where I met the leadership of COMMON Austria. They asked whether I would be interested in initiating the creation of COMMON in Poland. And that’s how I became the founder of COMMON Poland and served as its president for 10 years.

Being part of the boards of COMMON Europe, organizing countless conferences, including the very first COMMON Europe Congress in Warsaw,  I had the opportunity to meet many passionate advocates of this technology, including Frank Soltis – the father of AS/400 – who I had the pleasure of meeting many times.

Today, COMMON Poland is one of the largest COMMON organizations in Europe. The most recent fall conference gathered more than 350 participants, showing how vibrant the IBM i community in Poland is thanks to the work of the board, including its current president, Piotr Tkaczyk.

For many years, I worked as a CIO and head of project bureaus in banks that still use IBM i as their core banking platform, I was also CEO of a software house developing software for hospitals that also run on IBM i. Although I had more than a 10‑year break from COMMON and the IBM i community, old passions never truly fade. 

And from that passion, i‑Rays was born. 

It was originated by the idea I had to provide visibility to IBM i in Dynartace, the platform we provide to our customers. Those running IBM i sufferers as Dynatrace did not see IBM i. Now i-Rays is mature standalone software capable of integrating to Dynatrace natively but also to any other monitoring platforms via OpenTelemetry.

And none of it would probably have happened if I hadn’t been invited to that COMMON meeting in Austria.

About Marek Walczak
Marek Walczak is Generał Manager of i-Rays, developed by Omnilogy, which develops tools for the IBM i ecosystem.