About

Senior Analyst Jon Brown has 20+ years of experience in IT product management as well as a passion for marketing and product positioning.  

Jon was formerly Vice President, Market Insights at TechTarget, Enterprise Strategy Group’s parent company, and Publisher of TechTarget CIO, TechTarget IT Operations, and TechTarget Sustainability & ESG.

Prior to joining TechTarget and Enterprise Strategy Group, Jon held product, sales, and business management leadership roles at a variety of enterprise software firms. He holds a BA from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts and an MBA from The Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  

About

Principal Analyst Jim Frey has 30+ years of experience in networking and network management tools, technologies, and best practices as well as software product development, management, and marketing.

Jim was formerly VP Partner Marketing for Kentik Technologies, where he held senior leadership roles related to channel and technology alliance ecosystems and business development. Prior to joining Kentik, he held positions in industry research, marketing, product management, and software engineering, including roles at the executive level for the past 23 years.

Jim holds a BSc in Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and MSc in Computer and Information Sciences from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

About

Principal Analyst John Grady uses his nearly 20 years of IT vendor and analyst experience to help clients identify and understand key market trends, refine their messaging, and be more successful in the marketplace.

Prior to joining Enterprise Strategy Group, John spent four years at Symantec, where he was responsible for market insights and analytics supporting product, go-to-market, and executive stakeholders.

Previously, John worked as an analyst at IDC covering network, web, and email protection and leading initial research initiatives on then-emerging areas such as advanced threat prevention and DDoS protection. As an analyst, he has also focused on infrastructure channels, advising clients on indirect go-to-market strategies.

John has written for Dark Reading and has been quoted in Network World, CSO, eWeek, CRN, Silicon Angle, ITPro, SDX, HelpNet Security, and TechTarget, among others. He holds a BA in History from Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.

About

Principal Analyst Dave Gruber helps product marketing and management leaders develop winning strategies in highly competitive markets.

Prior to joining Enterprise Strategy Group, Dave held executive leadership roles at successful endpoint and application security companies. Most recently, he was the VP of Product Marketing at Carbon Black through its IPO, and previously he was VP of Products at Black Duck Software (acquired by Synopsys) where he led product marketing and product management.

In his current analyst role, Dave researches CISOs’ and security teams’ most pressing needs, working together with security vendors to develop successful product and go-to-market strategies, positioning, and messaging. Building on a strong technical background with early roles in enterprise application development, Dave became interested in figuring out why some products were more successful than others, which eventually led him to senior roles in software product management and product marketing.

Dave has appeared in Cybersecurity News, SC, InfoSecurity, TechRepublic, Dark Reading, RSAC, and ITPro Today, among others. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Maine in Orono.

About

Senior Analyst Gabe Knuth uses his experience as a practitioner, analyst, product marketer, and end-user computing (EUC) community leader to help organizations build successful go-to-market strategies.

The role of EUC and UCC has taken center stage for most organizations, and the influx of technology coupled with disruption among traditional EUC vendors has created a hyper-competitive market with lots of opportunities.

Over a career spanning 25+ years, Gabe has been an IT practitioner working with complex organizational structures on large-scale projects, and he has been involved with the EUC community as a respected blogger and speaker at industry events, user groups, and advisory board meetings. This background serves as the foundation for his analyst role at Enterprise Strategy Group, where he focuses on helping vendors take their products to market through multi-faceted campaigns that effectively communicate solutions to the increasingly complex challenges their customers face.

Prior to joining Enterprise Strategy Group, Gabe held marketing roles at prominent vendors such as FSLogix, Microsoft, and most recently VMware, where he led the GTM for VMware’s flagship desktop-as-a-service platform, Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure. He has spoken at industry events such as Citrix Synergy, VMworld, VMware Explore, Microsoft Ignite, Igel Disrupt, XenAppBlog VirtualExpo, and EUC Masters Retreat. His writing has appeared on the VMware blog and the TechTarget network of sites (including BrianMadden.com).

About

Principal Analyst Mike Leone draws upon his enthusiasm for bleeding-edge technology and his engineering and marketing background to provide a unique perspective to enterprise technology vendors.

At Enterprise Strategy Group, Mike focuses on all things data, analytics, and AI. His passion shines through in helping organizations improve everything from go-to-market strategies and messaging to product development and content creation.

Mike has a strong technical background, with early roles in software and hardware engineering focused on future product feasibility, modeling, and performance. He gradually moved into roles that interfaced with marketing by helping translate deep technical concepts into understandable business benefits.

Mike has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, AIthority, Fox News, eWeek, BizTech, SDXcentral, Computerworld, DevOps, Datanami, Data Center Knowledge, CBR, and T_HQ, among others. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts.

About

Practice Director Melinda Marks covers technologies that help organizations scale safely while adopting faster cloud-native development cycles.

With more than 20 years of experience in technology marketing and strategy, Melinda is passionate about conveying product value and differentiation and driving revenue.

Prior to joining Enterprise Strategy Group, Melinda was chief marketing and strategy officer for Soluble, a startup focused on automating application security testing for developers (acquired by Lacework). She was also VP of Marketing at Armorblox, VP of Marketing at Styra, and head of marketing for StackRox (acquired by Red Hat). Her experience includes running competitive/market intelligence and product marketing teams at Tenable and running global communications for four years at Qualys. She also spent many years at VMware, where she built its original customer reference program, led product PR, and was on the core planning team for VMworld since its inception.

Melinda is a Synopsys Outreach Foundation board member. She has appeared in CSO, TechCrunch, Dark Reading, The New Stack, VentureBeat, SC, and HelpNet Security, among others. Melinda holds a bachelor’s degree in English from UC Berkeley in Berkeley, California.

About

As Enterprise Strategy Group’s Senior Analyst for Business Applications, Brian McKenna focuses his research primarily on customer experience technology. Brian covers other business applications through a data management and analytics lens.

He is based in the London office of TechTarget, ESG’s parent company, where he also helps to direct ESG’s analyst services in EMEA covering business applications, information management, and cybersecurity topics.

Most recently Brian was business applications editor at TechTarget’s Computer Weekly publication. CW is well known for putting the voice of the IT customer first, and Brian brings that perspective to bear on his research, writing, and consultancy. Prior to joining Computer Weekly, Brian was the editor of Infosecurity magazine. He has also edited academic journals in information science and computer security.

Brian holds a degree in History and English from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and a doctorate from the University of Oxford, England. He was a British Academy post-doctoral fellow and Junior Research Fellow at Oxford before turning to IT journalism. He is also a Fellow of the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce).

About

Analyst Emeritus Jon Oltsik founded the cybersecurity practice at Enterprise Strategy Group in 2003 and has spent the subsequent 20 years studying cyber-threats, cyber-risk management, technical defenses, and CISO strategies.

With over 35 years of technology industry experience, he is widely recognized as an expert in all aspects of cybersecurity and is often called upon to help customers understand a CISO’s perspective.

Jon is a founding member of the Cybersecurity Canon, a project dedicated to identifying a list of must-read books for all cybersecurity practitioners, and he was named one of the top 100 cybersecurity influencers by Onalytica. Often quoted in the business and technical press, he is also engaged in cybersecurity issues, legislation, and technology discussions within the US government.

Jon has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Forbes, The New York Times, CNBC, Investor’s Business Daily, CSO, Tech Republic, Network World, and Dark Reading, among others. He holds a BA and MBA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

About

Principal Analyst Simon Robinson has more than 25 years of experience leading analyst teams and producing research and insight into all aspects of digital infrastructure.

Simon focuses on delivering research insights into the rapidly evolving technology landscape to help clients position their infrastructure solutions for success.

Simon was an IT journalist and editor before becoming a founding analyst at 451 Research, where he led the storage and infrastructure research practice. He is an industry-recognized authority, commentator, and public speaker on a range of emerging storage technologies, including disk-based backup, object storage, cloud storage, all-flash storage, and hyperconverged infrastructure. Simon also led survey-based products and managed 451’s analyst team prior to the company’s acquisition by S&P Global in 2019. He assumed overall responsibility for the Technology, Media and Telecoms research team following S&P’s acquisition of IHS Markit.

Simon is based in the UK and has a degree in Economics from the University of Central Lancashire.