Lyon, France - On the opening day of the COMMON Europe Conference 2026, Sitemule's Chief Architect and Partner Niels Liisberg was welcomed into the COMMON Europe Hall of Fame, joining a small registry of professionals recognized for a lifetime of contribution to the IBM Power Systems and IBM i community.

It is fitting that the honor was announced on day one. For more than thirty years, Niels Liisberg has been the kind of person a community builds itself around - someone who shows up, shares what he knows, and leaves the platform stronger than he found it. The Hall of Fame does not reward a single product or a single year of good work. It recognizes a career. And few careers map onto the modern story of IBM i as closely as his.

What the Hall of Fame represents

The COMMON Europe Hall of Fame exists to recognize distinguished professionals for their lifelong contributions to the IBM Power Systems and IBM i communities. The inaugural class of this prestigious registry was inducted during the annual COMMON Europe Congress in 2023, establishing a permanent record of the people whose work has shaped the platform and the community around it.

Those already named to the Hall of Fame give a sense of the company Niels now keeps:

• Shrirang "Ranga" Deshpande - former President of COMMON Europe (2016 - 2022) and a prominent advocate for the IBM i platform within the healthcare sector.

• Scott Klement - renowned developer, author, and expert in RPG, open-source technologies, and IBM i.
  
  

These are not honorary titles handed out lightly. They mark people who gave their time and expertise back to the community, year after year, without being asked. Niels belongs in that lineage.

Three decades of advancing - not preserving - IBM i

While much of the industry spent years planning its migration away from IBM i, Niels spent those same years building the tools that made migration unnecessary - and, for organizations that genuinely needed to move, the tools that made the migration land successfully.

His starting point was never "replace the old system." It was always a different question: what would it take to bring this trusted, rock-solid platform fully into the modern world? That conviction produced a body of work that today runs in production across Europe, North America, and beyond:

• IceBreak - the native IBM i application server he founded, the first of its kind to bring microservices, REST APIs, encryption, multi-threading, and web integration to the platform while running entirely within its own ILE environment. It remains the architectural heart of everything Sitemule builds.

• ILEastic, noxDB, and ILEvator - the open-source libraries that let RPG programs speak JSON, host API endpoints natively, and call cloud services directly. Freely available, production-grade, and used daily by developers worldwide.

• Blueprint - his most recent work, an MCP server purpose-built for IBM i that gives AI assistants access not just to a database schema, but to the actual business logic living inside decades of RPG programs and CL procedures. He calls it "the missing brain behind your IBM i data."

A permanent fixture on the COMMON circuit

Recognition from COMMON Europe is especially meaningful because COMMON has long been Niels's home turf. He is a regular across the international conference series - Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, the UK, and IBM THINK in North America - and not only as a speaker. He runs workshops, joins panels, hosts genuine technical webinars rather than product demos, and organizes the kind of community meetups that keep a platform vibrant across generations. He also serves on CEAC, the Common Europe Advisory Council, helping shape the platform's direction at a European level.

That community work sits alongside a long list of formal recognitions: IBM Champion every year from 2019 through 2026 - an eight-year run that fewer than a handful of people worldwide have reached - and IBM Redbooks Silver Author in 2025. The Hall of Fame induction adds a capstone that is about something larger than any single award: a lifetime of giving to the community.

Congratulations, Niels

From everyone at Sitemule, congratulations to Niels Liisberg on this richly deserved recognition. It honors the work, but more than that, it honors the spirit behind it - the belief that knowledge shared multiplies in value rather than diminishes, and that the best way to secure a platform's future is to keep building it.

The Hall of Fame celebrates a career. Knowing Niels, the most interesting chapters are still being written.