Jim Tuckwell

Chairman of the VCEDC Board

Jim grew up in Minocqua, WI and earned Bachelors (1974) and Masters (1975) degrees in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin, where he was named Marketing MBA Student of the Year in 1975.

Jim joined IBM’s General Systems Division as a sales representative in 1975 and has held a number of sales and sales management positions spanning small to large customers across numerous industries. In June, 1992 Jim joined the AS/400 Division where he led the creation of a cross functional development team responsible for supporting ISVs and AS/400 application development. The approach was later adopted by IBM ‘s mainframe server development organization.

In January, 1997 Jim was one of the first selected to help create and lead the marketing organization for IBM’s thin client initiative. In November, 2000 Jim was chosen by the Storage Networking Division to lead world wide product marketing for IBM’s iSCSI initiative which was responsible for the announcement of the industries first, iSCSI storage array. In May, 2002, Jim was selected to lead world wide product marketing for IBM Enterprise Storage. This role included all aspects of product marketing from initial customer requirements development, marketing messaging and deliverables development, and announcement launch activities.

Jim joined IBM’s Software Group in 2007 and from 2008 through 2012 was responsible for market management for the Information Management and WebSphere software brands in North America. From 2013 through 2016 Jim held world wide marketing leadership roles for the PureSystems and WebSphere brands. Jim retired from IBM at year end 2016.

Jim and his wife Bev moved “home” in 2007 and reside on the north shore of Fence Lake in Lac du Flambeau. Their daughter Sarah, her husband Joe, and their daughter Lauren live in Phoenix, Arizona. Jim joined the VCEDC board in 2014 and became board chairman in January 2018.