What a way to kick off the Opening General Session at IBM Connect 2017 this morning with IBM Watson Beats, beat-boxing skills, the two previous IBM Lifetime Champions Gabriella Davis and Theo Heselmans and the announcement of the newest IBM Lifetime Champion – Julian Robichaux!

The IBM Champion Lifetime Achievement award recognizes an IBM Champion who stands above their peers for service to the community. According to Amanda Bauman, Community and Advocacy Program Manager at IBM:

Julian’s contributions to the ICS community are numerous and long-standing.  Whether you first came across him presenting the Taking Notes podcast, which was the very first regular community podcast that existed, or you followed his developer tips newsletter that was published for nearly a decade by the  View, you might and probably did download one of his tools from OpenNTF. He is one of the best presenters out there, always showing new and inventive ways to work with technologies both old and new.  You can hardly be a developer in this ICS community for the past 15 + years and not have had a virtual hand up from Julian.

We’re super proud of Julian and we’re honored to call him a panagendian!

Congratulations Julian Robichaux, we can’t wait for the IBM Connect 2017 closing session on Thursday, February 23rd from 2:15 pm to 3:15 pm and the official IBM Lifetime Championship award presentation!