John Monroe
Inevitably and inescapably, richly varied computing technologies will come and go, but the data we create will remain, and will grow to unimaginable immensity.
Whitepaper
THE SUSTAINABLE PRESERVATION OF ENTERPRISE DATA
This whitepaper was jointly sponsored by Cerabyte, Fujifilm and IBM and was written by John Monroe. and Brad Johns
Whitepaper
THE IMPACTS OF GENERATIVE AI ON ENTERPRISE DATA
This whitepaper was jointly sponsored by Cerabyte, Fujifilm and IBM and was written by John Monroe. and Brad Johns.
Monroe Biography
John Monroe has been involved with the storage industry for more than 40 years, beginning in 1980.
- From October 1997 to February 2022, Monroe was a VP Analyst at Gartner. He covered the history and forecasted the future of consumer and enterprise storage markets, from components—the interplay of HDDs, SSDs, and tape—to external controller-based (ECB) networked/fabric-attached storage systems and server direct-attached storage (DAS).
- From 1990 to 1997, he was the VP of all storage lines at SYNNEX Information Technologies (now TD SYNNEX), a global distribution and manufacturing services firm, responsible for the profitable resale and OEM integration of HDDs, controllers, subsystems, and tape. Unlike most industry analysts, Monroe has had balance-sheet accountability for the stuff that he studies.
- From 1988 to 1990 he was Director of North American Sales for Kalok Corporation (a startup HDD manufacturer).
- From 1983 to 1988 he was part owner and general manager of Media Winchester, Ltd., a storage products distributor and integrator which was one of Seagate’s inaugural “SuperVARs.”
- He began his career in 1980 at Electrolabs, selling ICs, power supplies, cables, monitors, printers, 8-inch floppy disk drives, and 8-inch HDDs (“oddments of all things” related to computing electronics).
Monroe earned a BA degree summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College in 1976 and a master’s degree in fine arts (MFA) with a merit scholarship from Columbia University in 1980.
As in his analyses and forecasts of “infinitely-self-similar-but-never-the-same” storage market trends over many years, Monroe’s aim at Furthur Market Research is to bring actionable business perspectives tempered by Chaos Science, knowing that, within the unpredictably turbulent flow of dynamically changing systems—which “mirror a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth,” which reflect a fractal “geometry of the pitted, pocked and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined”*—there lies a deeply mysterious order that, in some way, at some scale, will always repeat itself.
*James Gleick
Chaos, Making a New Science