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Meredith Whalen

Chief Research Officer

As IDC’s Chief Product, Research & Delivery Officer, Meredith Whalen leads the company’s global product, research and data, and delivery organizations. Under her leadership, IDC delivers cutting-edge intelligence to the world’s leading technology vendors, enterprises, and investors as they navigate the evolving AI economy. Meredith sets the strategic direction for IDC’s global analyst community, shaping research methodologies and agendas that generate industry-leading data and actionable insights to drive high-impact business decisions.

With more than 20 years at IDC, Meredith has been a catalyst for some of the company’s most transformative initiatives. She founded IDC’s Industry Insights and Tech Buyer business units and pioneered the industry’s first comprehensive business use case taxonomy. She also led the creation of IDC’s DecisionScape methodology—a strategic framework that empowers organizations to better plan, implement, and optimize their technology investments.

A recognized thought leader and sought-after speaker, Meredith regularly delivers keynotes at major global technology events and advises senior executives on the trends shaping the future of business and technology.

Meredith holds a B.A. with honors from Wellesley College and an MBA with honors from Babson College’s F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business.

Rick Villars

Group Vice President, Worldwide Research

Rick is IDC’s leading analyst guiding research on the future of the IT Industry. He coordinates all IDC research related to the impact of Cloud and the shift to digital business models across infrastructure, platforms, software, and services. He helps enterprises develop effective strategies for using their diverse portfolio of cloud investments and applications. He supplies early guidance on implications of critical innovations such as the shift to cloud-based control platforms for deploying/managing infrastructure, data, and code delivery as well as the emergence of AI as a critical IT workload and part of all IT products/services.

BACKGROUND
During his 35+ years as an analyst at IDC, Rick helped launch IDC’s networking research group where he started IDC’s research on routing, servers, and TCP/IP networks. He also served as IDC’s Vice President for Internet & e-Commerce research, and as Vice President for Datacenter & Cloud, drove IDC’s research on the implications of virtualization for datacenter infrastructure and was part of the core team that launched IDC’s cloud research efforts in 2005.

Bryan Ma

Vice President, Data & Analytics

Bryan Ma is Vice President of Client Devices research, covering mobile phones, tablets, PCs, AR/VR headsets, wearables, thin clients, and monitors across Asia as well as worldwide. Based in Singapore, Bryan provides insights and advisory services for both vendors and users, and coordinates his team of analysts in building IDC’s core market data, analysis, and forecasts in these sectors.

Bryan has been quoted in a number of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times, BusinessWeek, The South China Morning Post, and The New York Times. He has been a featured speaker at numerous industry conferences and appears frequently as a guest commentator on television networks such as CNBC, Bloomberg, and the BBC.

Bryan has been with IDC since 1999, when he joined IDC’s Consumer Devices team in California. He has been the recipient of several recognitions at IDC, including multiple Research Quality awards as well as IDC’s Global Fellowship. Prior to joining IDC, Bryan was a Business Analyst at Arthur Andersen in Los Angeles, where he was part of the firm’s Business Consulting practice specializing in the financial services industry.

Bryan holds a degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. His university internships included experiences at IBM, Rockwell Semiconductor (now Conexant), Acuson (now part of Siemens), and PaineWebber (now part of UBS). Bryan is fluent in English and conversant in Mandarin Chinese.

Laurie Buczek

Group Vice President, Executive Insights

Laurie Buczek is the Group Vice President of Executive Insights at IDC, where she spearheads the global research initiatives that shape the industry’s understanding of digital business transformation, evolving buying behaviors, and technology investments. She leads IDC’s premier research practices, including the CMO Advisory Practice, C-Suite Tech Agenda, and Digital to AI Business Transformation.

As the principal analyst for the CMO Advisory Practice, Laurie advises senior marketing leaders on driving business growth through deeper customer connections and the strategic evolution of the marketing function, with a keen focus on AI’s transformative impact. Her expertise and thought leadership empower executives to navigate the intersection of technology, business strategy, and customer engagement in today’s dynamic digital landscape.

BACKGROUND
Laurie is a seasoned executive with over three decades of leadership experience spanning marketing, customer experience, IT, sales, and consulting. Throughout her career, Laurie has been a catalyst for innovation, guiding organizations through complex digital and operational transformations to drive sustainable growth. She spent 17 years at Intel Corporation, where she played a pivotal role in driving growth strategies for new products and markets, modernizing go-to-market capabilities, and leading large-scale digital transformation initiatives.

Beyond Intel, Laurie has held executive leadership roles across sectors. She served as President of a consulting business specializing in customer centered business transformation, Deputy City Manager in the public sector, and contributed her expertise at Forrester Research and Gateway, Inc.

Ashish Nadkarni

Group Vice President/GM, Worldwide Infrastructure Research

Ashish Nadkarni is Group Vice President and General Manager within IDC’s worldwide infrastructure research organization. Ashish oversees seven global research practices: infrastructure software platforms, cloud and edge services, storage and converged systems, performance intensive computing, compute infrastructure and service provider trends, enterprise and emerging workloads, and the future of digital infrastructure. Additionally, he oversees two regional research practices: Canadian infrastructure solutions, and Latin America enterprise infrastructure and cloud services. Ashish and his team also curate BuyerView, an industry leading portfolio of primary research products that provide a voice of the IT buyer on technology and services adoption trends including cloud and edge services, artificial intelligence (AI), high performance computing (HPC), security and networking, xOps, and software development.

Ashish draws upon his experience working in the IT industry to take a constructively critical view on the lifecycle of infrastructure-related services, deployments, systems, platforms, and technologies. Examples of his research coverage include heterogeneous, accelerated, edge, and quantum computing platforms and systems, rackscale, composable and disaggregated systems, memory, flash and other data persistence technologies, high-speed fabrics and interconnects, modern operating system environments, software-defined infrastructure, and physical, virtual and cloud computing software. Ashish takes keen interest in enterprise and emerging (e.g., cloud-native, web3) workloads, and AI and HPC deployments.

Stewart Bond

Vice President, Data Intelligence and Integration Software

Stewart Bond is Vice President of IDC’s Data Intelligence and Integration Software service. Mr. Bond’s core research coverage includes watching emerging trends that are shaping and changing data movement, ingestion, transformation, mastering, cleansing and consumption in the era of digital business. Having worked in the IT industry for over 30 years, from early experience in database and application development, through solution design and deployment, to strategic architectural consulting, Stewart has worked through some significant changes in the IT industry. His depth of field experience coupled with market insight gives him a unique perspective, valued by his customers and peers.

BACKGROUND
Mr. Bond has led numerous research projects and publications, and is recognized as a valued industry analyst by leading software vendors, consumers, and peers in the areas of enterprise and data integration, business-to-business integration, Big Data, and cloud. Prior to becoming a market and industry analyst in 2011, Stewart spent 10 years with IBM as a master certified IT architect, consulting on information management and middleware strategies, and delivering integration solutions to customers around the globe.