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 ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights) in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.
Mel Brue
Senior Analyst, FinTech
Mel joined the firm 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.
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 & Data
Steve McDowell is a technologist with over 25 years of deep industry experience in a variety of strategy, engineering, and strategic marketing roles, all with the unifying theme of delivering data, storage and systems technologies into the enterprise market. Steve most recently led the ground-up development of a hyperconverged storage/compute product at Nimble Storage (an HPE company), where he had also led the storage protocol and fibre channel engineering teams. He has engineered solutions for storage replication, NAS, and storage virtualization with companies such as NCR, Fujitsu-Softek, and Network Engines. Steve also spent eight years at AMD in corporate strategy and strategic marketing roles, where he focused heavily on emerging technologies, helping OEM partners deliver a wide range of innovative solutions to the enterprise market.
Anshel Sag
Senior Analyst, Mobility & VR
Paul Smith-Goodson
Senior Analyst, AI & Quantum Computing
Paul Smith-Goodson brings a wealth of accumulated technical knowledge and real-world experience to MI&S. Paul follows current AI and quantum computer implementations, trends, and the status of ongoing global academic, corporate, and government research. Because of wide-ranging interests, his technical knowledge spans several subjects, including e-commerce, IoT, data communications, call center analytics, search engine optimization, space weather, GPS, and high frequency radio.
He has held corporate leadership positions with AT&T, Compuserve, Advanced Network Services, and MCI. His experience spans operations, sales, corporate strategy, international strategy, and technology strategy. Paul attended Montana State University and majored in chemistry. He has an advanced class amateur radio license, and holds several patents pertaining to geo-location and high frequency radio.
Will Townsend
Senior Analyst, Security, Carriers and Enterprise Networking
Will is a senior analyst covering security, telecommunications infrastructure, carrier services, and enterprise networking. He has spent his diverse career in product management, product and channel marketing, business development, sales and strategic alliances managing wireless programs with AT&T and Telus. A risk-taking executive that has built businesses and participated in several start-ups, Will brings over 25 years of experience from technology leaders Dell, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard among others to Moor Insights & Strategy. Will earned a BA in Economics from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Texas State University.
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
Contributor, 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.