James Ready


James "Jim" Ready was a businessman and technologist. His company Montavista Software did pioneering work in adapting the operating system Linux for real-time applications.
Ready received his BA from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971 and his MA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976.
Ready was founder and President of Hunter & Ready beginning in 1980, which merged with CardTools in 1986 to become Ready Systems. Ready Systems merged with Microtec Research in 1993, went public in 1994, and was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1995. Ready served as chief technical officer at Microtec and Mentor until he left in 1999 to found MontaVista Software. Jim served as founder and CEO of MontaVista until June 5, 2006 when the role of CEO was taken over by Thomas F. Kelly. Jim switched to the role of CTO of MontaVista. After the acquisition by Cavium Networks, Jim became CTO of MontaVista, now a wholly owned subsidiary. As of mid-2012, Jim was Chief Technology Advisor at Cadence Design Systems.