Steve Will retired as IBM i chief architect. What changes

Steve Will retired from IBM at the end of July after 41 years, nearly two decades of that as IBM i chief architect. Kris Whitney has the job now. If your first reaction was to wonder whether IBM is quietly winding the platform down, the short answer is no, and the evidence is easy to check. The longer answer is that something real did change, just not the thing most people are worried about.

What actually happened

Will announced his retirement effective at the end of July 2026, capping 41 years at IBM. He had been IBM i chief architect since 2007 and also carried the IBM i CTO title and Distinguished Engineer status, an unusual combination that made him both the person setting the operating system’s direction and the person explaining it to customers.

Keri Olson, Director of IBM i Development, appointed Kris Whitney as the new chief architect. In his sign-off note to the community, Will pointed people to two names rather than one: Olson for development questions, Whitney for architecture questions. So if you are asking who runs IBM i now, the honest answer is two people instead of one. That detail matters more than it looks, and I will come back to it.

IT Jungle reported the transition on August 3. As of this writing, almost nobody else has covered it.

Who Kris Whitney is, and what his résumé predicts

Whitney is not an outside hire, and that is the single most reassuring fact in this story. He has been at IBM Rochester for more than 19 years as a Senior Technical Staff Member. If IBM had gone looking outside the lab for someone to run IBM i architecture, that would have told you the bench was empty. It clearly is not.

His visible track record is specific. He led development for Db2 Mirror for i and served as its chief architect. Db2 Mirror started in 2015 when long-time customers approached the IBM i high availability team asking for continuous availability, and it shipped as one of the more significant additions to the platform in the last decade. He also led IBM i public cloud enablement and has presented repeatedly at COMMON on running IBM i in the cloud.

Read that list again: availability, Db2, cloud. Not languages. Not developer tooling. Not the RPG compiler.

I would bet on the platform’s center of gravity following the new architect’s expertise, because it usually does. Expect continued emphasis on high availability, database capability, and hybrid cloud integration, which is roughly where IBM has been pushing anyway. What I would not expect is a sudden burst of developer-experience investment. If you were hoping the next era of IBM i would be defined by better tooling and a modernized language story, Whitney’s background does not point that way. That is a prediction, not a complaint. Db2 for i and availability are where IBM i genuinely outperforms its competition, and leaning into that is a defensible strategy. He is already on the record pushing that agenda: in April he told IT Jungle that more than half of BRMS users are still running the free version IBM wants them off of, the kind of nudge you would expect from an architect whose background is availability and database, not developer tooling.

The thing that actually changed

For most of two decades, IBM i had something almost no other enterprise platform has: one named human who answered roadmap questions in public. Will did COMMON sessions, wrote for the community, and answered questions on social media under his own name. When a shop wanted to know whether a capability was coming, there was a person to ask.

That role has now been split in two. Olson handles development, Whitney handles architecture. Neither inherits the megaphone, because the megaphone was never part of the job description. It was a thing one person chose to do for two decades.

So the practical loss is not technical direction. It is translation. IBM i shops are about to find out how much they relied on a single individual to turn IBM’s roadmap slides into plain answers. My guess is that the gap gets filled eventually, either by Whitney growing into the public role or by the community leaning harder on IT Jungle, COMMON, and the business partner channel. In the meantime, expect roadmap questions to get slower, vaguer answers than you are used to.

This is not the retirement story you think it is

Two very different things get called “the IBM i retirement problem,” and conflating them leads shops to the wrong response.

The first is the one in this article: IBM’s chief architect retired. That is a governance and communication question. Its mitigation is watching what IBM ships, not what IBM says.

The second is the one that should actually keep you up at night, which is that the developers who understand your RPG and CL code are retiring, and the pipeline behind them is thin. The 2026 Marketplace Survey put the skills shortage above security as the community’s top concern for the first time since 2017. We have written separately about what IT managers should do before 2030.

These share a word and nothing else. IBM promoting from within does not help you retain your last RPG developer. Your succession planning does not depend on who holds a title in Rochester. Treat them as unrelated risks, because they are.

Does the IBM i roadmap survive the handoff

The question underneath all of this is whether IBM is still investing in IBM i. Look at what shipped, not at what was announced.

IBM publishes an IBM i roadmap that currently extends to 2035 and gets refreshed every year. IT Jungle’s analysis in April 2025 sketched Power Systems and IBM i out to 2040. IBM i 7.6 shipped in April 2025 and is expected to be supported for roughly a decade. IBM has said a three-year release cadence is the sweet spot for the platform, which puts the next release in the expected window rather than in doubt.

More recently, and more usefully, IBM shipped 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8 in July 2026 alongside the new Power S1112 entry server. Building a new low-end machine is expensive and only makes sense if you expect to keep selling to smaller shops for years. That is money spent, not a promise made. That same release also shipped real new capability, not just hardware support: bring-your-own-key encryption that changes how DR planning has to work is the kind of feature investment a platform in maintenance mode doesn’t bother building.

A platform being wound down does not get new entry hardware, new technology refreshes, and an internal successor with 19 years of tenure. It gets maintenance-only releases and a migration guide. IBM i is not getting either.

The date that should actually be on your calendar

Here is the part of this story that carries a deadline, and it has nothing to do with who runs architecture.

IBM i 7.4 standard support ends September 30, 2026. That is under two months away. End of marketing already passed on April 30, 2026, so new 7.4 licenses are no longer sold. After September 30 you can pay for Service Extension, which runs through September 30, 2029, but that is a stopgap with a cost attached, not a supported position. The cost is public if you know where to look, and what Service Extension actually charges, and what it stops covering, is worth reading before you budget for it. Extended extended support for 7.3 runs out on the same September 30 date.

The hardware gates complicate this if you have been putting off a refresh. IBM i 7.4 is the last release supported on Power8. 7.5 runs on Power9 and later. 7.6 requires Power10 or Power11. So a shop still on 7.4 running Power8 is not looking at an OS upgrade, it is looking at a hardware purchase, and the entry-level Power11 option only started shipping in late July. What that box costs, and why buying it does not by itself clear the September deadline, is the decision underneath the date.

If you are on 7.3 or 7.4 right now, that is your actual problem. An IBM i leadership change in Rochester is not an action item. An end-of-support date seven weeks out is.

What to do this quarter

Three things, in order.

Check your release and hardware level today and put a real date on the upgrade if you are on 7.3 or 7.4. If you need new iron to get to a supported release, procurement lead times mean you needed to start already.

Stop treating IBM’s roadmap as something you have to take on faith. Watch technology refresh contents, hardware announcements, and support lifecycle notices. Those are verifiable. Roadmap slides are not.

Put your energy into the retirement problem you can actually influence, which is the knowledge walking out of your own building. Document the code nobody else understands while the person who wrote it is still employed. If you want a concrete starting point for using AI tools on RPG and CL rather than another strategy document, the IBM i AI Field Guide covers the prompts and workflows shops are getting real output from, and we have a broader overview of where to start with IBM i modernization.

Bottom line

Steve Will’s retirement is a genuine loss for the IBM i community, and it is not a signal about the platform’s future. IBM promoted a 19-year insider, kept shipping technology refreshes, and launched new entry hardware in the same quarter. What you lost is the person who translated IBM’s plans into straight answers, and that gap will take a while to fill.

What you did not lose is a supported platform with a roadmap into the 2030s. Spend your worry on the September 30 support deadline and on the developers in your own shop who are closer to retirement than Steve Will was. Those you can do something about.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the new IBM i chief architect?

Kris Whitney, a Senior Technical Staff Member with more than 19 years at IBM Rochester. He led development for Db2 Mirror for i and IBM i public cloud enablement, and served as chief architect for Db2 Mirror. He was appointed by Keri Olson, Director of IBM i Development.

Why did Steve Will retire from IBM?

He retired after 41 years at IBM, effective at the end of July 2026, having held the IBM i chief architect role since 2007. It was a normal end-of-career retirement, not a reorganization or a signal about the platform’s health.

Does Steve Will’s retirement change the IBM i roadmap?

No. IBM’s published IBM i roadmap runs to 2035 and is refreshed annually. IBM shipped 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8 in July 2026 alongside a new Power S1112 entry server, so investment in the platform is observable rather than promised.

What IBM i deadline should shops be worried about in 2026?

IBM i 7.4 standard support ends September 30, 2026, and extended extended support for 7.3 runs out on the same date. After that you are on paid Service Extension or unsupported. That deadline matters far more to your shop than the leadership change does.