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.