Chief Technology Officer

Called "arguably the one individual most responsible for establishing the embedded OS and tools market" by LinuxDevices.com, James is a recognized authority in the embedded systems and real-time software industry. The co-founder of Ready Systems, he developed the world's first commercially viable real-time operating system (RTOS) product: the VRTX real-time kernel.

Ready Systems, founded in 1980, merged with Microtec Research in 1993, went public in 1994, and was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1995. During this period, Jim served as Ready Systems' President, and as chief technical officer (CTO) at Microtec/Mentor.

Jim invented the category of embedded Linux commercialization in 1999 when he founded MontaVista Software to provide the Linux operating system to the embedded systems market, and to offer embedded-system expertise to the open source Linux community.

Jim got his BA from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971 and his MA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976.