Eric Burgener serves as a Research Director for IDC’s Storage Practice, which includes Storage Systems, Software and Solutions research offerings, quarterly trackers, end-user research as well as advisory services and consulting programs. Mr. Burgener’s areas of coverage include flash (from a solutions not a component point of view) and software-defined storage, and he is an active participant in the IT Buyers Research Program at IDC. He has worked with enterprise storage technologies since 1991, including both hardware and software-based solutions.  For most of his career on the vendor side, Mr. Burgener worked with emerging open systems technologies, including high availability in the early 1990s, replication, SAN management and storage virtualization in the late 1990s, continuous data replication and most recently flash and software-defined storage for use in virtual environments.

Prior to joining IDC, Mr. Burgener held various leadership positions in product management, product marketing, business development and technical support at leading high tech companies like Tandem Computers, Sun Microsystems, Veritas Software, ConvergeNet, Dell, Topio, and Mendocino Software.  He also worked a stint as an Executive in Residence at Mayfield, a leading venture capital firm based in the Silicon Valley.  Most recently, Mr. Burgener was the Vice President of Product Management at Virsto Software, a company acquired by VMware in 2013. 

Mr. Burgener holds an undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.