He walked into his first migration on his first day back in America.
In 1997, Jim Galfano arrived in Silicon Valley and took a job at KLA-Tencor, a major semiconductor equipment company. The reason they hired him: the company was consolidating several email platforms into Microsoft Exchange and needed someone who understood where they were going well enough to get them there cleanly.
He hadn't planned to be a migration specialist. It just turned out that every role that followed had something being moved from one place to another — email platforms, financial systems, file shares, phone infrastructure, on-premises servers making way for the cloud. The technologies kept changing. The underlying challenge never did: move an organization's data safely, completely, and without disrupting the people who depend on it.
"As long as companies exist and technology advances, there will always be organizations that need to move from where they are to somewhere better."
His cage was next to Google's. His hallway neighbor was Linus Torvalds.
Working at Pocket.com in the late 1990s, Jim spent considerable time at Exodus Communications in Santa Clara — one of the premier internet data centers of the era. Pocket.com's server cage was immaculate: properly secured, earthquake-proofed, cables managed with care. The cage immediately next door was a different story — gear not strapped down, cable management an afterthought. The company in that cage was a small search startup that hadn't yet become a household name. It was Google.
Around the same period, Jim needed access to a shared wiring closet at a neighboring Santa Clara office and didn't have the key. He knocked. The person who came downstairs was Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. They had a brief, friendly exchange and both went back to work. No ceremony, no drama. That was simply what it meant to work in Silicon Valley at that specific moment — the people building the infrastructure of the modern world were just the people next door.
A server on a kitchen table. A city's finances at risk. An opportunity.
When the dot-com collapse was reshaping the Valley, Jim was brought in to investigate a malfunctioning financial system sending Tracy residents water bills in the thousands of dollars. He fixed the bug. What he found next was more alarming: the city's critical financial server was sitting on a kitchen table next to a water cooler. No server room. No redundancy. No plan.
The city asked him to stay as IT Manager. He accepted. Over the years that followed, he built Tracy's technology infrastructure from scratch — a proper server room, enterprise-grade hardware, NetApp storage, virtualization, a staffed Help Desk, a full VoIP migration. He made the case to city leadership, navigated city council budget approvals, and delivered. On August 19, 2002, the Tri-Valley Herald put him on the front page, above the fold. His mother had the article framed.
The experience that most consultants never get access to.
The engagements that followed took Jim through some of the most demanding environments in enterprise IT — Exelon Nuclear, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Inova Health System, Edelman Financial Engines. Compliance requirements, data sensitivity, and zero tolerance for error defined every one of them.
The defining chapter came when Jim was selected to join Microsoft's FastTrack program as a Migration Support Specialist — working directly with Fortune 100 clients on migration strategy, tooling, and execution across the full M365 ecosystem. Most external consultants never see that vantage point. The experience gave him an inside-out understanding of how Microsoft itself approaches these problems: a different and more complete kind of knowledge than what can be gathered from the outside.
That kind of outcome doesn't come from following a checklist. It comes from having seen enough difficult situations to recognize a novel problem clearly — and work through it until it isn't one anymore.
The Knauf Insulation engagement illustrates what that experience looks like in practice. As the sole migration specialist on a global program spanning 20+ countries across Europe, Asia, and North America, Jim encountered something the standard playbook hadn't addressed: several facilities had no internet connectivity at all. His solution was to ship Microsoft Azure Data Box hardware directly to those sites, stage the data locally, and execute through standard tooling once it was in position. Every server retired. Every country accounted for. Zero data lost.
The company he would have wanted to work for.
Jim spent a significant portion of his career working through staffing and consulting agencies, and he understands that model thoroughly — including its limitations. The traditional approach places a consultant, steps back, and goes quiet until the contract ends. Technical guidance, mentorship, and real investment in outcomes are generally not part of the arrangement.
Summit Migrations was built around a different premise: that consultants with genuine technical backing consistently deliver better results for clients, and build more satisfying careers for themselves. Every Summit engagement carries the weight of 25+ years of hands-on enterprise experience. When a difficult problem appears — and on complex migrations, they always do — there is someone behind the engagement who has seen it before.
From a server cage in Santa Clara to a migration spanning four continents — the experience behind Summit is the kind that only comes from having actually done the work, for a long time, at the highest level the industry demands.