The Maximo Community in 2026: User Groups, Champions, and the Ecosystem That Keeps It Running

The Maximo community has always been one of the product's greatest assets. Long before "community-led growth" became a Silicon Valley buzzword, Maximo practitioners were sharing automation scripts on forums, presenting implementation patterns at user group meetings, and building tools to fill gaps in the product. In 2026, with MAS 9.2 now released and the ecosystem broader than ever, that community is the engine that keeps the platform evolving in ways no vendor product team could achieve alone.

This article is a field guide to the Maximo community in 2026. It covers the people, programs, and structures that make the ecosystem work: Maximo User Groups, the IBM Champion program, MaximoWorld and other conferences, online forums and practitioner networks, and the tools and resources that emerge from all of it. Whether you are a new Maximo administrator looking for help, an experienced consultant wanting to contribute, or a decision-maker trying to understand the ecosystem around the product you are investing in, this is your map.

Maximo User Groups: The Local Backbone

Maximo User Groups, or MUGs, are the oldest and most durable community structure in the ecosystem. The concept is simple: practitioners in a geographic region or industry vertical meet regularly to share knowledge, present case studies, discuss product issues, and network. Some MUGs have been running for over fifteen years, surviving platform transitions from Maximo 6 to Maximo 7.1 to 7.6 and now to MAS, with memberships that span generations of administrators, consultants, and end users.

How MUGs Are Organized

Most Maximo User Groups operate with a light governance model. There is typically a chair or co-chairs who coordinate meeting logistics, a mailing list or LinkedIn group for communication between meetings, and a cadence of two to four meetings per year. Meetings are usually hosted by a member organization at their facilities, though virtual and hybrid meetings have become standard since 2023. IBM provides logistical support and often sends product managers or technical architects to present roadmap updates and answer questions, but the MUGs are independent — they set their own agendas and priorities.

The largest and most active MUGs in 2026 include:

• Maximo Users Group of Australia (MUG Australia): The most active regional MUG, driven by the concentration of mining, utilities, and transportation organizations running Maximo in Australia. Meets quarterly with in-person events rotating between Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. The group maintains an active LinkedIn community between meetings.
• Maximo User Group UK & Ireland: Covers the UK and Irish Maximo community with a focus on utilities, defense, and public sector implementations. Meets three times per year, typically with a mix of practitioner presentations and IBM roadmap sessions.
• Maximo User Group North America: The broadest geographic MUG, covering the US and Canada. Given the size of the North American Maximo installed base, this group operates with regional sub-chapters (East, Central, West) to keep meetings accessible. The annual meeting typically coincides with MaximoWorld.
• Maximo Utilities Group: An industry-vertical MUG focused specifically on utilities (electric, gas, water). This group addresses the unique requirements of utility asset management — meter assets, grid infrastructure, vegetation management, regulatory compliance — that cut across geographic boundaries.
• Maximo Nordic User Group: A regional group covering Scandinavia, notable for the advanced MAS adoption in the region. Nordic organizations were early movers on MAS, and this MUG is where many lessons learned from migration are shared.

What Happens at a MUG Meeting

A typical MUG meeting runs for a full day and includes a mix of session types:

• Practitioner case studies: A member organization presents a project, integration, or operational challenge and how they addressed it. These sessions are often the most valuable because they show real implementations with real problems, not marketing-curated success stories.
• IBM roadmap and product updates: An IBM product manager or technical architect presents the latest release content and upcoming roadmap items. This is where practitioners get direct access to the product team and can ask questions about features, timelines, and directions.
• Partner showcases: IBM Business Partners demonstrate tools, accelerators, and services that extend Maximo. This is where the ecosystem of third-party tools — mobile solutions, inspection drones, IoT platforms, analytics tools — becomes visible to practitioners.
• Open discussion and Q&A: Unstructured time for practitioners to ask questions, share problems, and get help from peers. This is where the community's collective knowledge is most directly accessible. Many intractable problems get solved in these sessions, drawing on the combined experience of dozens of Maximo implementations.

The value of MUGs extends beyond the meetings themselves. Members build professional relationships that persist for years, creating a network of contacts they can reach out to when facing challenges. A practitioner who attended a MUG meeting where someone presented a Maximo Mobile deployment can contact that person six months later when their own organization is implementing Mobile. This informal support network is one of the most underrated benefits of the Maximo community.

The IBM Champion Program

The IBM Champion program is IBM's formal recognition of individuals who make outstanding contributions to the IBM community. It is not specific to Maximo — IBM Champions exist across all IBM products, from Watson to Db2 to Cloud — but the Maximo community has a particularly strong Champion cohort. In 2026, there are over 40 active IBM Champions in the Maximo category, representing consultants, administrators, developers, and business partners.

What Makes an IBM Champion

IBM Champions are nominated by peers or IBM staff and selected based on their contributions to the community. The criteria include:

• Content creation: Writing blog posts, articles, books, or documentation that helps other practitioners. This includes content on the IBM Community blog, LinkedIn, personal blogs, and industry publications.
• Speaking and education: Presenting at conferences, user group meetings, webinars, and workshops. Champions are frequent presenters at MaximoWorld, MUG meetings, and IBM events.
• Community engagement: Answering questions on forums, mentoring new practitioners, and facilitating community discussions. Champions are often the people who respond to questions on the IBM Community forums and LinkedIn groups.
• Advocacy and feedback: Providing product feedback through the IBM Ideas Portal, participating in beta programs, and advocating for the product and community within their organizations and networks.

The designation is annual, meaning Champions must maintain their contributions to retain the title. This is not a lifetime achievement award — it is a recognition of ongoing, active contribution. IBM Champions receive early access to product roadmap briefings, direct access to product managers, invitations to Champion-exclusive events at conferences, and IBM branding for their profiles. The access is the real benefit: Champions often learn about upcoming features months before public announcement, which helps them create more valuable content and provide better guidance to the community.

Maximo Champions in 2026

The Maximo Champion cohort in 2026 includes some of the most influential voices in the community. While the full list is published on IBM's Champion directory, several Champions have become particularly prominent for their contributions:

• Steven Shull: Known for deep technical content on Maximo integration patterns, MAS architecture, and automation scripting. His blog and conference presentations are widely referenced by practitioners tackling complex integrations.
• Biplab Das Choudhury: Creator of the "All Things Maximo" monthly newsletter on LinkedIn, which aggregates community content across categories. Biplab's curation has become the primary discovery mechanism for Maximo content for many practitioners who cannot track every source individually.
• Stefan Hoffmanns: Focused on reliability, APM, and the Maximo Application Suite's predictive capabilities. His workshop reports and technical deep dives are essential reading for organizations on the reliability journey.
• Phil Runion: Known for practical, day-to-day Maximo administration content. His presentations on user management, workflow configuration, and system administration focus on the realities that Maximo administrators face every day.
• Sachin Kr Gupta: Focused on Maximo Monitor and IoT integration. His content bridges the gap between traditional EAM practitioners and the emerging world of condition monitoring and sensor-based asset management.
• Mahdi Salah: Known for migration and upgrade content. His detailed, technically grounded walkthroughs of the Maximo 7.6 to MAS 9 migration path have helped many organizations navigate the transition.

These Champions, along with the broader cohort, form a network of community leaders who collectively produce a significant portion of the technical content that practitioners rely on. They are not IBM employees — they are consultants, administrators, and practitioners who contribute because they are passionate about the product and the community. IBM's Champion program gives them recognition, access, and a platform, but the content and leadership come from the individuals themselves.

MaximoWorld: The Flagship Event

MaximoWorld is the largest Maximo-focused conference, organized by IBM and typically held annually. It is the closest thing the Maximo community has to a "homecoming" — the event where the entire ecosystem gathers in one place for several days of deep technical content, roadmap briefings, networking, and partner exhibitions. In 2026, MaximoWorld continued its trajectory as the premier Maximo event, with attendance numbers reflecting the community's growth.

What MaximoWorld Offers

MaximoWorld is structured around several content tracks:

• Product Track: IBM's official roadmap and feature deep dives. This is where the product team presents new releases, demonstrates upcoming features, and takes questions from the audience. The MAS 9.2 release was a major focus in 2026, with sessions covering the migration path, new capabilities, and the integration between Manage, Monitor, Health, and Predict.
• Practitioner Track: Customer case studies and implementation stories. These sessions are where the real-world experience lives — practitioners presenting what worked, what didn't, and what they learned. The case studies range from large-scale migrations to niche integrations to innovative uses of Maximo's automation capabilities.
• Partner Track: IBM Business Partners and third-party vendors showcasing tools and solutions that extend Maximo. The partner ecosystem is a critical part of the Maximo story, and this track is where practitioners discover the tools that fill gaps in the standard product.
• Hands-on Labs: Instructor-led technical sessions where attendees work through exercises on Maximo environments. These labs cover topics like automation scripting, integration configuration, Maximo Mobile setup, and Health scoring configuration. They are consistently among the most highly rated sessions because they provide direct, guided experience.
• Community and Networking: Beyond the formal sessions, MaximoWorld is where the community connects in person. The exhibit hall, evening events, and informal gatherings are where the relationships that sustain the community throughout the year are built or renewed.

The Maximo User Choice Awards

The Maximo User Choice Awards, presented at MaximoWorld, recognize the best add-on products, integrations, and solutions in the Maximo ecosystem as voted by the user community. The awards are significant because they are practitioner-voted, not vendor-judged. They reflect what real Maximo users find valuable, not what marketing departments want to promote.

Categories typically include Best Mobile Solution, Best Integration Solution, Best Analytics and Reporting Solution, Best Industry Solution, and Best Newcomer. The awards drive visibility for the winning solutions and help practitioners discover tools that their peers have validated. For the partner community, winning a User Choice Award is a significant market signal.

Online Forums and Practitioner Networks

The in-person community is complemented by a robust online ecosystem where practitioners connect, ask questions, and share knowledge between events. This online community operates across several platforms, each serving a different purpose.

The IBM Community Forum

The IBM Community forum (community.ibm.com) hosts the official Maximo discussion space. It is the successor to the old IBM DeveloperWorks forums and the Maximo Asset Management space. Practitioners post questions about configuration, customization, integration, migration, and every other Maximo topic. IBM support staff, Business Partners, and experienced practitioners respond, creating a searchable knowledge base of thousands of answered questions.

The forum's value is in its history. Questions that were asked and answered five years ago are still searchable and still relevant. A practitioner facing a workflow configuration issue in MAS can often find a thread from the Maximo 7.6 era that addresses the same underlying problem, because the workflow engine has not fundamentally changed. The forum is the first stop for many practitioners when they encounter a problem they have not seen before.

LinkedIn Groups and Communities

LinkedIn has become the primary real-time communication channel for the Maximo community. Several LinkedIn groups and the broader practice of posting Maximo content directly to LinkedIn have created a vibrant, fast-moving layer of community interaction:

• Maximo Users Group on LinkedIn: A large, active group where practitioners post questions, share content, and announce events. The group is unaffiliated with IBM, making it an independent community space.
• IBM Maximo LinkedIn group: IBM's official LinkedIn presence for Maximo, used for announcements, content distribution, and community engagement.
• Individual practitioner posts: Many Maximo Champions and active community members post regularly to LinkedIn. Biplab Das Choudhury's "All Things Maximo" monthly roundup, Stefan Hoffmanns' workshop reports, and Mahdi Salah's migration guides are all distributed primarily through LinkedIn posts. LinkedIn has effectively become the Maximo community's professional publishing platform.

The IBM Ideas Portal

The IBM Ideas Portal is not a forum in the traditional sense, but it has become one of the most important community platforms for Maximo. Practitioners submit enhancement requests — feature ideas, bug fixes, usability improvements — and the community votes on them. Ideas that gain community support get reviewed by the product team and prioritized for upcoming releases.

Several features in MAS 9.2 originated from Ideas Portal submissions. The SMTP email handling improvements with OAuth support, the scheduled report send-from configuration, and the user management changes in MAS 9.2 all trace back to Ideas Portal submissions that gained community traction. This creates a genuine feedback loop between the community and the product team, and it gives practitioners a direct mechanism to influence the product's direction.

YouTube and Video Content

Video content has grown significantly in the Maximo community. Several channels and series produce regular Maximo content:

• Naviam's "More by Naviam" podcast: Episode 1 featured Steven Shull and Phil Runion breaking down MAS 9.2 updates. The podcast format allows for longer, more conversational content than written posts, and the community response suggests it fills a gap in the content ecosystem.
• IBM's official Maximo channel: Product demos, feature walkthroughs, and recorded sessions from IBM events. This is the official video content, useful for understanding IBM's positioning and feature summaries.
• Partner and practitioner channels: Several IBM Business Partners maintain YouTube channels with tutorial content, product demos, and recorded webinars. These tend to be more technically focused and less polished than IBM's content, which is exactly what practitioners often need.

The Partner Ecosystem

The Maximo partner ecosystem is a critical part of the community. IBM Business Partners range from large global system integrators to small boutique consultancies, and they collectively employ thousands of Maximo practitioners. The partner community contributes to the broader ecosystem in several ways:

Tools and Accelerators

Partners build tools that extend Maximo's capabilities beyond what the standard product offers. These include:

• Mobile solutions: While Maximo Mobile has improved significantly, some partners offer specialized mobile applications for specific industries or use cases — offline inspection apps for remote infrastructure, barcode and RFID integration, and augmented reality-assisted maintenance.
• Integration platforms: Pre-built integrations between Maximo and common enterprise systems — SAP, Oracle, GIS platforms, SCADA systems. These accelerators reduce integration effort and provide proven patterns.
• Analytics and reporting: Custom dashboards, KPI frameworks, and reporting tools that go beyond Maximo's built-in analytics. Partners like Maven Asset Management produce analytics tools specifically designed for Maximo operational data.
• Migration and upgrade tools: Tools that automate parts of the migration from Maximo 7.x to MAS, including code analysis tools, configuration comparison utilities, and automated script conversion.

Consulting and Implementation Services

Partners provide the implementation muscle for most Maximo deployments. While IBM provides the product and some consulting services, the majority of implementation work is done by partner consultants. The partner community's collective experience — thousands of implementations across industries and geographies — is a knowledge asset that benefits the entire ecosystem. When a utility in Australia needs to implement Maximo, they can engage a partner who has implemented Maximo at ten other utilities and bring that experience to bear.

The partner community also serves as a career path for Maximo practitioners. Many Maximo administrators and consultants start at an end-user organization, gain experience, and then move to a partner or IBM for broader exposure. This movement of practitioners between organizations spreads knowledge and best practices across the community.

Community-Driven Innovation

One of the most striking aspects of the Maximo community in 2026 is the degree to which innovation is practitioner-led rather than vendor-led. IBM builds the product, but the community discovers what is possible with it. This practitioner-led innovation takes several forms:

Automation Scripting as Community Art

Maximo's automation scripting capability has been a community favorite since Maximo 7.5. Practitioners share scripts on forums, in blog posts, and at user group meetings. These scripts solve real problems — automating work order approvals, enforcing business rules, integrating with external systems, customizing the UI — and they represent the collective ingenuity of thousands of practitioners. The community has effectively created a shared library of automation scripts that new practitioners can draw from.

Integration Patterns and Reference Architectures

The community has developed a body of knowledge around Maximo integration patterns that goes beyond IBM's official documentation. Practitioners have documented patterns for Maximo-to-SAP integration, Maximo-to-GIS synchronization, Maximo-to-SCADA data ingestion, and many other integration scenarios. These patterns are shared in conference presentations, blog posts, and forum threads, creating a reference library that practitioners can use when designing new integrations.

The Ideas Portal as Innovation Driver

The IBM Ideas Portal has become a genuine mechanism for community-driven product innovation. When a practitioner submits an idea that gains community support, it enters the product team's backlog. This is not a suggestion box that no one reads — the product team actively monitors the portal, and ideas that gain traction are discussed in product planning sessions. Several features in MAS 9.2, including the user management simplification and the SMTP OAuth support, originated from Ideas Portal submissions. The portal has created a direct path from practitioner need to product feature, and the community's voting power determines which needs get prioritized.

Getting Involved

For practitioners who want to participate in the community, the entry points are straightforward:

• Attend a MUG meeting: Find your regional or industry MUG and attend the next meeting. You do not need to be an experienced practitioner — MUGs welcome new users and provide the most direct access to peer knowledge.
• Join the LinkedIn community: Follow the Maximo Users Group on LinkedIn, follow IBM Champions and active practitioners, and start engaging with content. LinkedIn is where the day-to-day community conversation happens.
• Post on the IBM Community forum: If you have a question, search the forum first — it has probably been asked before. If you cannot find an answer, post your question. If you see a question you can answer, answer it. The forum is a collective knowledge base that grows with every contribution.
• Submit an Idea: If you have a feature request or enhancement suggestion, submit it on the IBM Ideas Portal. If you see an idea you agree with, vote for it. Community voting is what drives ideas to the product team's attention.
• Attend MaximoWorld: If your organization uses Maximo, make the case to attend MaximoWorld. It is the single most valuable community event of the year, and the connections and knowledge you gain will pay for the trip many times over.
• Create content: If you have solved a problem, built an integration, or learned something useful, write about it. Post on LinkedIn, the IBM Community blog, or your own blog. Content creation is how the community's knowledge grows, and it is also the path to becoming an IBM Champion.

The Community as Competitive Advantage

The Maximo community is not just a nice-to-have social feature. It is a genuine competitive advantage for the product and its users. Organizations that choose Maximo gain access to a knowledge base of thousands of practitioners, a library of community-created tools and scripts, a network of experienced consultants, and a direct line to the product team through the Ideas Portal. This is something that newer EAM competitors cannot replicate, no matter how polished their products are.

For practitioners, the community is a career asset. The relationships built through MUGs, conferences, and online forums lead to job opportunities, consulting engagements, and professional growth. The Maximo community is one of the few technology communities where a relatively small investment in participation — attending meetings, answering questions, sharing what you know — produces outsized returns in knowledge, network, and opportunity.

In 2026, with MAS 9.2 released and the platform's capabilities expanding into AI, predictive analytics, and integrated reliability, the community is more important than ever. The product is more powerful, but it is also more complex. The community's collective knowledge — shared through MUGs, conferences, forums, and content created by Champions and practitioners — is what helps organizations navigate that complexity and get value from their investment. The ecosystem that keeps Maximo running is not just IBM. It is the people, and they are worth knowing.