James Schmidt
Vice President of Engineering

James Schmidt joined Adaptec in 2007 as vice president of engineering. In this role, he is responsible for Design, Customer and Test Engineering and Quality Control for Adaptec's Data Protection Solution (DPS) products. This marks his return to Adaptec, where he held various engineering and technical positions from 1986-1999, most recently as the company’s CIO.

Mr. Schmidt has more than 20 years of experience leading engineering, operations, and IT teams. Previously, he was vice president of engineering at Applied Micro Circuits, a designer of semiconductor and board products. Prior to that, he served as vice president of engineering and operations at 3ware, a designer of RAID host adapters. Additionally, Mr. Schmidt was vice president of engineering and operations at HearMe, a designer of live voice gaming systems for the online gaming community. Mr. Schmidt has also held engineering positions at Forward Technology, Plexus Computers, Mitchell Humphrey Software, and NCR.

Mr. Schmidt holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering, both from Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas.