Jim grew up in Reston, VA and attended George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. Jim entered the IT arena in 1982 as a programming assembler for a graphics company, then went on to the database area with two retail chains. Jim then went to work for Cable & Wireless Communications as a Software Engineer and finally joined Microsoft in 1996. Since at Microsoft, Jim has mainly worked in transforming customers to Microsoft products and now to the cloud. Jim currently works as part of Azure core engineering - specialized compute - legacy. Jim has brought together his extensive legacy system knowledge with advances in the Azure cloud environment. Jim has co-authored several books including “Data Analytics and Visualization,” by McGraw Hill.