About
team
Analysts
Patrick Moorhead
Founder, President, Principal Analyst
Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is consistently ranked in the top echelon of all technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (via ARInsights) and is consistently top ranked in “press citations” (via Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor for both Forbes and CIO. He a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, SaaS, and the Internet of Things (IoT), and Patrick is a deep expert in cloud, client computing and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments
Mel Brue
Senior Analyst, FinTech
Mel joined the Moor team as an analyst after 25 years of tech industry experience in marketing, business development, and communications across various disciplines with companies ranging from start-ups to global brands. Brue’s early experience in tech and highly regulated spaces led her to hone in her focus on problems that aren’t usually easy to solve and the companies solving them. She was CMO of Lottery.com, a member of the founding team of ProWallet, and has worked with global companies on mobile payments and transactions, including Qualcomm, Kyocera, Visa, First Data, Transaction Wireless, and others. Although she’s now heads down in more techy adventures, she began her career working as a publicist on the hit television show, Seinfeld. Mel is an active philanthropist focusing on youth, education, and the environment, and has been recognized by the NFL and Pop Warner for fostering youth sports.
Bill Curtis
Analyst-in-Residence, Industrial IoT and IoT Technology
Bill Curtis is an analyst and consultant focused on large scale IoT systems. His career covers the whole stack from tiny devices to big clouds. Most recently, he was Principal Strategist for Arm’s IoT group while it grew from a small embedded team to a full-stack platform spanning devices, connectivity, and analytics. He was a founder of Thread Group, home of the standards-based low-power IP networking protocol. Prior to Arm, he was Senior Fellow and Design Engineer at AMD, CTO of Dell’s Consumer group, and Head Computer Scientist for Landmark Graphics (Halliburton). Bill’s diverse leadership experience helps his clients plan Internet of Things strategies as scalable solutions while avoiding one-off implementations.
Rhett Dillingham
Senior Analyst, Cloud Services
Rhett also serves as VP Product for Jask. With 17+ years of experience in enterprise hardware, software, and cloud products and services, Rhett has a passion for delivering market-leading technology products and services. In his product leadership roles at Rackspace and AWS, he helped shape the change in consumption of technology via innovative cloud services. At Moor Insights, he is helping clients make the most of the opportunity this disruption presents with his focus on infrastructure and platform services across public, private, and hybrid cloud. Most recently, Rhett was Vice President of Product Management at Rackspace on OpenStack Public Cloud then Private Cloud. Rhett earned his MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.
Karl Freund
Senior Analyst, Machine Learning & HPC
Karl Freund has spent his career transforming cool technologies into thriving businesses through creative and effective Go-To-Market karl-freundstrategies. Recently, as the General Manager of AMD’s HPC business, he became fascinated by the potential of Deep Learning in Artificial Intelligence to improve our lives and businesses. Now at Moor Insights, he helps clients realize the potential of Deep Learning and HPC. Karl holds a bachelors degree from Texas A&M University in Applied Mathematics, and a Masters of Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Matt Kimball
Senior Analyst, Servers
Over the last 25 years, Matt has developed an expertise across the product life cycle – from gathering product requirements to creating messaging to developing and executing “go-to-market” strategies as well as real-world IT experience. Matt began his career in professional services engineering and transitioned into product management and product marketing roles for some of the largest companies in the high tech market including Xerox, Seagate, and AMD. Most recently, Matt has worked at AMD as a Senior Product Marketing Manager. In this role, he was responsible for product message creation and testing, branding and all facets of go to market. Matt served as an IT director responsible for datacenter consolidation, data warehousing, web infrastructure, and data integration.
Steve McDowell
Senior Analyst, Storage
Anshel Sag
Analyst, Mobility & VR
Paul Smith-Goodson
Analyst In-Residence, Quantum Computing
Will Townsend
Senior Analyst, Carriers and Enterprise Networking
Mark Vena
Senior Analyst, Smart Home, Home Automation, Security & Console Gaming
Mark Vena is a proven strategic technology executive with more than 25 years in the high-tech space with many well-known companies such as Compaq, Dell, Alienware, Synaptics, Segway, Sling Media and Neato Robotics. He has led and managed numerous highly popular consumer technology brands in the PC, gaming, consumer electronics and “smart home” space. Mark’s rich consumer product management and product marketing background gives him a unique and real world “end to end” understanding of the challenges that companies face with developing innovative products and services for consumers. Mark graduated Cum Laude from Boston College in 1984 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and grew up in New Jersey. He currently resides in San Jose, California.
Christopher R. Wilder
Senior Analyst In-Residence, Security
Christopher has over 25 years of experience in cybersecurity, intelligence, and physical security experience. His life’s work is at the convergence of physical and information security – Internet of Things (IoT), networks, electronic surveillance, and operational intelligence. Wilder began his career in Naval intelligence and from there expanded his career in the intelligence community (IC) by protecting and securing dozens of critical infrastructure projects and special operations facilities worldwide. In addition to working with the top security technology and service providers, he is the personal advisor to several heads of state and government agencies on cyberwarfare, counter-terrorism, and infrastructure development/deployment.
Additionally, Christopher has expertise in deploying “Red Team” physical/cybersecurity operations, intelligence and sitrep assessments, executive protection, and medical/operational evacuation.
Operations
Dan Pickens
Business Director
Dan Pickens is Business Director for Moor Insights & Strategy’s datacenter business and is responsible for operations and customer relations. Dan has over 25 years’ experience in marketing, communications, media relations, analyst relations, positioning, and messaging. Prior to joining MI&S, Dan created and ran his own marketing and communications consultancy. He spent 12 years with AMD, the last three as senior product marketing manager for commercial PC and server processors. Prior to that, he created, and for six years managed the global industry analyst relations program. Initially, at AMD, Pickens spent two years creating and executing national and international public relations programs for the desktop and notebook businesses.