Phil Buckellew

President, Infrastructure Modernization Business Unit Rocket Software

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Phil Buckellew is President of the Infrastructure Modernization Business Unit at Rocket Software, appointed in April 2022 with worldwide responsibility for development, product management and solutions across the company’s mainframe and infrastructure modernization portfolio. Rocket’s business rests on an unfashionable but durable proposition: that the world’s largest banks, insurers and governments are not going to move off the mainframe, and what they need is tooling that lets those systems participate in modern development, security and compliance practice. Buckellew came to it from IBM, where his career ran through three successive waves of enterprise computing — social and collaboration software, enterprise mobility with MobileFirst, and finally public cloud, where he was General Manager for IBM Cloud Platform-as-a-Service. He began, unusually for the field, in consumer products brand management.

Career Highlights

• Appointed President of Rocket Software’s Infrastructure Modernization Business Unit on 4 April 2022, announced alongside Darlene Williams as Chief Information Officer.
• Oversees worldwide development, product management and solutions development for Rocket’s mainframe and infrastructure modernization business.
• As General Manager for IBM Cloud Platform-as-a-Service, drove overall product strategy, offerings, development and operations across IBM’s public cloud, including database, security and monitoring services.
• As Vice President of Mobile Enterprise for IBM MobileFirst, set strategy and coordinated requirements across that portfolio.
• Led the worldwide evangelist and competitive specialist team in IBM’s Collaboration Solutions division, positioning IBM as a leader in Social Business.
• Represents Rocket Software on IBM’s Mainframe Skills Council, formed with SHARE and other organisations to build the next generation of mainframe talent.
• Began his career with five years in brand management in the consumer products industry.

Professional Journey

Buckellew studied Management Information Systems at The University of Texas at Austin and later took an MBA at Harvard Business School, but his first five working years were spent not in technology at all: he worked in brand management in the consumer products industry. That grounding in positioning and market definition is visible in the shape of the IBM career that followed, which was consistently about how a portfolio is framed and sold rather than solely about how it is built.

At IBM he worked through three of the company’s major strategic pushes in succession. In the Collaboration Solutions division he led the worldwide team of evangelists and competitive specialists charged with establishing IBM as the leader in what the company then called Social Business — the effort to bring social software patterns into the enterprise. He then became Vice President of Mobile Enterprise for IBM MobileFirst, setting strategy and coordinating requirements for the portfolio at the height of IBM’s enterprise mobility campaign, including its partnership work with Apple.

His last IBM role was General Manager for IBM Cloud Platform-as-a-Service, where he owned product strategy, offerings, development and operations across the public cloud platform, spanning its database, security and monitoring services. That is a materially different job from the two before it — accountable for a running platform and its economics rather than for a portfolio’s direction — and it is the experience Rocket Software hired.

Rocket appointed him President of its Infrastructure Modernization Business Unit in April 2022, announcing him alongside a new Chief Information Officer as part of a broader leadership build-out. The unit covers Rocket’s mainframe and infrastructure modernization products worldwide, with Buckellew responsible for development, product management and solutions development. The strategic argument he has made publicly is that customers with decades of investment in core systems need to modernize without disruption rather than migrate away, and that the constraint on doing so is increasingly people: he sits on IBM’s Mainframe Skills Council, formed with SHARE and other industry organisations specifically to address the shortage of mainframe talent.

Education

The University of Texas at Austin

Bachelor of Business Administration, Management Information Systems

Harvard Business School

MBA