Jim works as a consultant at GlassHouse Systems Inc. supporting their mainframe (IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE) customers across Canada, Jamaica, and the USA.
He first developed an interest in mainframes as a high school student in Toronto. The IBM Canada complex was down the road from his school and IBM provided the students an IBM 1130 and access to a S/360-75 at the IBM Toronto Lab. After high school he attended the British Columbia Institute of Technology in Vancouver from 1971 to 1973 studying "Data Processing" on an IBM S/360-30. As a student he worked on mainframes at the Defence Research Board of Canada and at Columbia Computing Services.
After graduation in 1973 he joined IBM and spent most of his career in technical roles and from 1992 had been the Product Manager for the mainframe operating systems in Canada. From May 1998 to December 2001 he was a mainframe Product Manager for IBM Americas where he led the launch of Linux on the mainframe. From January 2002 to May 2007 he was the Linux and Open Source leader for IBM Canada and then moved to mainframe sales in May 2007. He took on his final role at IBM as Canadian mainframe technical sales leader in January 2015 and retired in January 2016.
He is a graduate of the BC Institute of Technology, has co-authored several IBM Redbooks, and is a speaker on information technology across the US and Canada. He has been attending SHARE since 1975 and was an IBM Representative to SHARE from 1998 through 2015. Jim has been the Virtualization Track Leader in the Linux/VM Program at SHARE since his retirement from IBM. He was the recipient of SHARE's John R. Ehrmann award in August 2024. He splits his time between Toronto, Ontario and Vittoria, Ontario.