Rocket.Build Recap: Our 2025 Event and Winners Announced

In November, Rocketeers from around the world came together for one of the most exciting and inspiring weeks on our calendar: Rocket.Build. What started in 2014 as a small internal hackathon has evolved into a global celebration of innovation, creativity, and collaboration and proof that when brilliant minds come together around a common goal, anything is possible.

Watch the energy, teamwork, and creativity behind Rocket.Build 2025:

Rocket.Build in 2025: Innovation in Action

Rocket.Build is so much more than a hackathon. It’s an opportunity to work together and make something out of nothing. Participants come from internal Rocketeer teams and external stakeholder groups to bring new ideas and product features to life under the careful guidance of our leadership team.  

This year, more than 700 participants from 21 countries joined Rocket.Build’s virtual qualifiers, with 24 finalist projects and teams gathering at our Waltham, MA headquarters to bring their ideas to life. Over just a few days, they coded, tested, and refined solutions that could shape the next generation of Rocket Software products.

The competition is more meaningful because we’re all striving toward the same goal: to make a difference for our customers.

Themes That Shaped Rocket.Build 2025

As we looked at impact and what matters most to us and our customers, partners, and Rocketeers, we homed in on three key themes:

The Future of Work

It’s no secret that technology is shaking up workplace norms, processes, and the workforce at large. One of the key themes for Rocket.Build this year centered on reimagining the future of work and how Rocket can support its stakeholders through and beyond this transition.  

That meant we were looking for projects that were cutting-edge in their rethinking of efficiency, automation, and sustainability toward a more efficient, smarter, and more resilient future.

Cross-Product Integration

Believe it or not, Rocket has hundreds of products in its ecosystem, each purpose-built. However, we see opportunities all the time for incremental innovation: rethinking how they connect and interact to create stronger (or entirely new!) capabilities out of creative repurposing.

That’s why this year’s second Rocket.Build theme centered on cross-product integration – unlocking new value through connection. That meant we were looking for projects that were unique in how they approached things like seamless interoperability or finding new ways to combine and uncover value within the tools we already have.

Supportability

Our overarching goal for Rocket.Build – and as a company – is to build better for our customers, partners and teams. One of the fundamentals of that strategy is support: insuring our commitment to these stakeholders with products that are more resilient, proactive, and user-friendly.

This year’s third theme was all about supportability, meaning we focused on projects that improved workflows like troubleshooting and diagnostics, gave additional insights and observability, or made it easier to be proactive and solve problems before they happen.

Celebrating the 2025 Winners

Guided by the themes of The Future of Work, Cross-Product Integration, and Supportability, our Rocket.Build teams pushed the boundaries of what’s possible. The remit was lofty: to create things like AI-powered diagnostic tools, cross-platform integrations, and features that make Rocket Software solutions smarter and more seamless than ever.

After a few days of focused collaboration and visionary thinking, our Executive Leadership Team selected this year’s winners as follows:

1st Place: Danilo Vandyuk, Karen Davis, Sergei Burtsev, Serhii Grabchuk

2nd Place: Abisheak S, Gokul Raj Shanmugam, Jebakumar Jeya Sankar, Sasi Kumar Manickam

3rd Place: Anirudharam Tadepalli, Gautam Rayabagi, Sonthosh Shankar Praveen Vonteddu, Ravi Lakhan Cheepa

Each team that placed achieved a significant milestone and demonstrated creativity, execution, and potential impact deserving of the highest awards the event offers. We have already seen this year’s winning project make it to full production, and we couldn’t be more grateful for every team’s participation and efforts in this year’s events.  

Rocket.Build 2025’s Winning Project: The Rocket Security Patch Auditor (RSPA)  

Karen and her team (Danilo Vandyuk, Sergei Burtsev, and Serhii Grabchuk) from Poland created Rocket Security Patch Auditor (RSPA), a modern web-based interface that brings mainframe patch management out of the green screen and into an intuitive browser experience, eliminating the need to log directly onto the mainframe for routine tasks.  

Designed to help large, highly regulated enterprises keep pace with an ever‑changing patch landscape, RSPA continuously surfaces the latest IBM maintenance updates and highlights exactly which fixes are required to keep systems compliant.

What RSPA Does

RSPA connects to your mainframe environment and automatically analyzes installed software against IBM’s current maintenance levels, flagging missing security and compliance-related patches in a single, easy-to-read dashboard. Instead of wading through complex reports and screens, teams get clear, actionable insight into gaps before they become audit findings.

For large global banks and other highly regulated institutions, even a single missed security patch can have outsized operational, financial, and reputational consequences. RSPA shortens the time from IBM update to mainframe remediation by simplifying analysis, automating much of the audit preparation work, and giving non‑mainframe experts the context they need to act quickly.

Rocket.Build’s Culture and Values Awards

In addition to the medal awards, we also have awards for the best embodiment of Rocket’s values across several categories. The winners in each of those are as follows:

Most Innovative Award: Mangesh Diyewar, Rishabh Gupta, Raunit Kohli, Rashmith Tula

Rocket Values Award: Pauline Giambiasi, Florent Baud, Jeremy Cathelin

Best Presentation Award: Ron Sigal, Uri Dvir, Lior Carmon

Closing Thoughts on Rocket.Build 2025

True to Rocket’s values of Empathy, Humanity, Trust, and Love, Rocket.Build wasn’t a competition in the traditional sense. It was collaboration at its best. With a heaping dose of gratitude, we couldn’t be prouder of what this cohort accomplished. We look forward to carrying this momentum into 2026.