Jim Ricotta is President and Chief Executive Officer at Azuki, responsible for the overall leadership of the company including implementation of its strategy and business plan.  Jim is a seasoned CEO, entrepreneur, and board member with over 25 years of experience in relevant domains such as digital media, content distribution, application-layer networking, and middleware software platforms.  Jim has a solid record of achievement having guided several startups from early stages of growth, on to successful acquisitions and post-merger integrations.

Most recently, Jim was Vice President and General Manager of IBM’s Appliance business unit, which delivered groundbreaking middleware appliances for Web 2.0/SOA applications.  As part of IBM’s WebSphere division, Jim was able to grow the business by 3x and 5x in consecutive years.  Jim joined IBM through IBM’s $100M acquisition of DataPower Technology in October 2005, where he was President and CEO.  Jim led DataPower beyond the startup phase into successive year-year revenue growth for its award-winning middleware solutions utilizing high performance XML, Web Services and application-aware processing within an SOA framework. DataPower
remain one of the most rapidly growing and innovative product lines in IBM’s Web 2.0 /SOA portfolio.

Prior to DataPower, Jim was Vice President and General Manager at Cisco Systems leading their Content Networking business unit and driving a 10x increase in revenue to $100M+ for the company’s content distribution, streaming, and caching product offering.  Jim joined Cisco through Cisco’s $800M acquisition of SightPath in May 2000, where he served as President, CEO and co-founder from its inception in January of 1998.  Jim co-founded SightPath with two MIT professors, and after raising initial funding, Jim built the team that defined, launched, and shipped the industry’s first enterprise CDN product within 12 months.

Jim has been deeply involved in digital media since joining the early team at Avid Technology in 1990.  Jim held various executive marketing and general management positions for this leading digital media software and systems provider, and over his 7-year career there Avid grew into a $500M per year public company with a dominant market position in the digital media production, broadcast video and film industries.  As a testament to his work and its impact on the industry, Jim won an Emmy Award for his role in developing the Avid editing system. 

Jim also spent 5 years with Sun Microsystems during their early growth years where he held product management and sales positions.

Jim has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering degree from Cornell University.