Carla Arend is a program director with the European Business and Enterprise Solutions (BES) team, responsible for managing the European information management research service. Arend provides industry clients with key insight into market dynamics, vendor activities, and end-user trends in information management and storage software and services markets. She is also responsible for the Western European storage software data tracking product.

In addition to syndicated research, Arend has worked on many custom consulting projects identifying opportunities in the European storage software and services market and has authored white papers on subjects such as Big Data, cloud storage, data protection and recovery in virtualised environments, archiving software, and virtualisation software.

Arend is regularly asked to speak at industry events, strategy workshops, sales kick-offs and trainings, partner events and end-user events.

Before taking up her current role, Arend spent five years with the European Software group, where she worked on the Internet Commerce Market Model, conducted security and systems management research, and was responsible for managing IDC's European software trackers.

Arend holds a BA in business administration from University of Mannheim and an MSc in business administration and management of technology from Copenhagen Business School, in addition to course work at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Bangkok.

Follow Carla on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/carla_arend