As Group Vice President, Software Development and Open Source, Al Gillen oversees IDC's software development research portfolio. Research disciplines in this group include developer research covering census, demographics and developer activities; platform and cloud application services for developers, and developer lifecycle and quality assurance products. In addition, Mr. Gillen jointly oversees IDC's DevOps research program, and runs a program focused on the ecosystem of open source software pan-industry.

The massive digital transformation taking place in the industry today is leading to an arms race to build modern applications using modern development techniques, and deploy those applications on modern infrastructure. The growing shift to a DevOps deployment and lifecycle model, and the emergence of tools and services built on open source software to support this shift, highlights the value of this portfolio.

In his 18^th year at IDC, Mr. Gillen has participated in numerous IDC research areas, including infrastructure software (operating environments and virtualization software), enterprise servers, and developer software and services. He has long tracked open source software in infrastructure software markets, and now has expanded open source coverage to cover other market segments.

During his career at IDC, Mr. Gillen participated many studies that tie platform research and system software research together, including mapping workloads to software markets, business value, ROI and cost of ownership studies, the business value of virtualization, and server platform migration. This research has been conducted across operating systems including Linux, Windows and Unix.

Mr. Gillen is an industry advisor to major server vendors, infrastructure software vendors, and numerous companies participating in the open source ecosystem, as well as to end-use organizations. He has participated at numerous industry events as a keynote presenter, panel moderator, and as a subject matter expert at product launches. He is frequently quoted in trade and business publications around the world.

Prior to joining IDC, Mr. Gillen served as editor-in-chief for two computer industry trade publications. Mr. Gillen began his career as a software developer, and performed embedded system design and developed real-time software applications for a 10-year period. He holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Follow Al on Twitter @algillen.