We at Moor Insights & Strategy are thrilled to welcome Mike Leone to our team. Mike brings deep expertise across data platforms and analytics; data infrastructure, storage, and management; data governance and regulation; and enterprise data strategy. I’ve worked with Mike and have kept track of his successes over the years, so I know what he brings to the table in terms of client advisory, research, and market education. He has a strong track record of delivering actionable insights, with a focus on how data platforms underpin modern AI and business transformation initiatives.
It’s typical of Mike’s passion for his work — and his communication skills — that he took the simple Q&A prompts I gave him and came back with the thoughtful, personal post that follows.
Erin Zehr — President, Moor Insights & Strategy
I’ve spent the better part of two decades doing one thing: helping people make sense of complex enterprise technology. My title has changed, the scale has changed, and the markets have changed dramatically. Over those years my coverage has evolved from storage infrastructure to the data, analytics, and AI markets that are reshaping enterprise technology today. But that core instinct, translating the deeply technical into something a business leader can act on, has been the constant since before I even knew it was a career.
Where It Started
I fell in love with technology late in high school. I took a class, loved it, and the more I tinkered the more I knew that tech was my path. I was fortunate to land at Stonehill College and major in computer science. It was a hidden gem of a program. The student-to-professor ratio was unbelievable, and we got exposed to far more than you’d expect from a smaller school. Most of the graduating seniors had opportunities to pursue master’s degrees or start working right away. I took the job route, mostly because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to specialize in yet.
One experience at Stonehill ended up shaping how I think about technology to this day. A professor pulled me into a research project to digitize personal barcodes from loyalty and subscription cards onto a mobile device. This was a time when iPhones didn’t exist yet and we were in the earliest stages of mobile device display capabilities. Getting my hands on the latest Palm OS PDA to build on fed a curiosity that’s never really gone away.
I developed the application, tested it, pitched for funding, explored the patent route, and even walked into a Blockbuster asking them to scan a PDA screen (where I was looked at like a weirdo). We hit a dead end when we found out Palm had already filed something similar, so it never went anywhere commercially. But that experience rewired how I approach things. Going through every stage of taking an idea from concept to reality at that age, with a professor who pushed me to treat it like a real venture and not just a class project — that stayed with me. The technical side is just one piece. You have to understand timing, who else is in the space, what the market looks like, and most importantly, how to communicate why something matters to people who aren’t living in the technical details.
From Engineer to Analyst
My first job was at EMC as a performance engineer in the mid-range storage division. I had no idea what performance engineering actually meant going in, but I landed on a great team with some early mentors who showed me the ropes. I worked with software and hardware engineering teams helping architect future products. Everything from projecting theoretical hardware limits based on I/O paths to benchmarking adapter scalability limits and analyzing CPU threading dependencies within our software stack. I was also part of the team that tested the first storage arrays with SSD drives. I still remember the day we discovered the write wear-leveling that occurred on SSDs.
What I figured out over those first few years is that the coding, scripting, and benchmarking weren’t the only things I wanted to do. I really liked understanding the architecture and how the technology worked end-to-end, but where I found my passion was translating that technical stuff into something that made sense and mattered to customers. A lot of customers don’t care about queue depths and IOPS curves. They want to know whether the thing they’re buying can handle their workload at scale, whether it’s reliable, and whether performance is consistent. That bridge between the deeply technical and the business side is where I wanted to be.
It took a little over five years to realize that one product line within one company wasn’t going to satisfy my intellectual curiosity for enterprise tech. I needed more problems, more of the landscape, more of what’s coming next. An opportunity to become an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group presented itself, and I haven’t looked back.
ESG is where I really grew into the analyst role, and the people there had everything to do with it. Mentors, leaders, genuinely great humans who made everyone around them better. They pushed me outside of my comfort zone. It’s one thing to talk to a work colleague about a new tech trend. It’s entirely different doing that with the CEO of the actual company.
The work was incredibly hands-on. I did technical and economic validation of vendor solutions, got into the technology itself, covered multiple markets, and helped people understand why an announcement or a capability actually matters and what you can realistically expect to get out of it. That combination of technical validation and market storytelling is what I’d been chasing since EMC, and I got to do it across an entire landscape of enterprise technology. I always joke that being an analyst has ruined me for many other jobs because it’s impossible to get bored when you’re constantly learning from the companies building what’s next.
Mike’s coverage area at Moor Insights & Strategy will include data platforms and analytics, data infrastructure and storage, and data governance and enterprise data strategy. I asked him to reflect on dynamics across these long-established and rapidly evolving technologies — and how they intersect with AI, infrastructure, observability, and application development. These are intersections that MI&S analysts are watching closely and, really, geeking out about in terms of how they might explore together and independently at depth.
What I’m Watching Right Now
Data platform convergence is accelerating, and AI is the forcing function. The lines between data warehouses, data lakes, lakehouses, AI platforms, and even transactional databases are disappearing. Everyone is racing to be the one platform that handles everything. Structured, unstructured, analytics, AI, batch, streaming. AI is what’s accelerating all of it because these workloads demand access to everything, everywhere, in real time. The competitive dynamics in this space right now are some of the most fascinating I’ve seen in my career.
But platform convergence only works if the data underneath is ready, and for most organizations it’s not. Everyone wants to talk about models and agents, but the data is still a mess. Budgets are increasing, which is great, but the money is being thrown at technology when the actual problems are organizational — skill gaps, siloed teams, unclear ownership, a culture that prioritizes speed over rigor. I’m happy to see that governance is getting the attention it deserves, with several industry events already this year putting it front and center. Data governance, AI governance, observability, orchestration; these things are what actually makes AI work in production. This requires knowing what data you have, whether you can trust it, how AI is using it, and who’s accountable when something goes wrong. Until organizations treat this as a leadership discipline and not just an infrastructure line item, the model conversation is irrelevant.
Even when the data foundation is solid, the infrastructure economics are shifting underneath it. We’re moving from a training-dominated world to an inference-dominated one, and inference is a different beast. The cloud-first assumption for AI is cracking. Organizations are actively repatriating AI workloads to on-premises to control costs, and a lot of them feel trapped by their current cloud provider. The need for right-sized infrastructure matters more than ever, and inference is often not a GPU-first world. How organizations navigate the compute mix between cloud, on-prem, and edge is going to be one of the defining infrastructure decisions of the next few years.
And then sitting on top of all of it is the operational maturity gap, which is where I’m spending a lot of my time. I’m in the camp that believes the model is a commodity. The infrastructure layer has been mature for a long time. What’s not keeping up is the operational layer. Things like observability, integration logic, guardrails, and data pipelines are where production AI breaks down. Getting a green light on a pilot is easy when you throw curated data and your most tech-savvy internal folks at it. Moving that into production across the rest of the organization is a completely different challenge. The hardest problems in enterprise AI live in everything around the models.
Why Moor Insights & Strategy
I’ve known and respected Patrick Moorhead and the MI&S team for a long time, and there are several analysts here I’m incredibly excited to collaborate with going forward. I’ve been watching how Moor operates for a while, and being able to help shape where the company goes next is really exciting.
What drew me in is the freedom to customize how you deliver value. MI&S doesn’t put vendors in a box. The way you add value is unique based on the goals, objectives, and positions of the companies you’re working with. There’s a builder mentality here, and I relate to that.
I think the analyst world as a whole has a ways to go in terms of transformation, understanding what ROI looks like for clients, and ensuring that ROI is tangible. There’s a willingness within MI&S to explore new opportunities, to move quickly, and to not let the analyst market evolve around us without being active in driving that transformation. With AI, there are so many ideas I’m eager to work through with this team that can deliver greater value to clients than anything we’ve been able to do before. And doing that work in the open, covering markets externally, getting it in front of the people who actually need it rather than locking it behind subscriber paywalls — that’s the kind of environment I want to be in.
Beyond the Day Job
When I do get downtime, you’ll usually catch me on a golf course, playing men’s softball, spending time in the backyard with the kids, or enjoying pool time throughout the warm months. And I can’t forget the home remodeling projects. I really enjoy doing things that use other parts of my brain, whether it’s finishing a basement, rebuilding a deck, or knocking a wall down to create more of an open concept. To be honest, I always have more projects going than I probably should.
But above all of it, family is what centers everything in my life. I grew up in an Italian household where it was all about love and food, and that has carried forward. I’ve lived in New England my whole life, growing up in Rhode Island and then moving to central Massachusetts about 12 years ago. I have a wife and two daughters, and between coaching when we can and watching them play more competitively on club field hockey and softball teams, much of our free time is spent at games, events, and tournaments. Seeing the passion our girls have, the fun they’re having with friends and teammates, it’s everything. They’re learning what it means to be part of a team, to compete, to work towards a common goal, to be dependable, to be supportive, and to recognize that it’s okay to have an off day. I remember experiencing all of that growing up and it shaped so much of who I am, both personally and professionally. I wouldn’t change these moments for the world.
Thanks again to Mike for sharing this overview of his career; we’re excited he has joined us for the next chapter in it. As AI continues to reshape how infrastructure, data, applications, and services intersect, I know Mike will be an important addition to the MI&S team as we continue to expand our depth in areas increasingly central to client priorities. ~ E.Z.
