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IDC EXPANDS HIGH-PERFORMANCE SYSTEMS ANALYST GROUP

IDC announced that it has expanded its Workstations and High-Performance Systems (WHPS) analyst group, which covers the worldwide markets for workstations, technical servers/high performance computers, supercomputers, clusters, grids, graphics and visualization.

Vernon Turner, group vice president of IDC's Global Enterprise and Technical Solutions, reported that:

• Dr. Earl Joseph II has been promoted to WHPS program vice president, reporting to Turner, from his former role as IDC's research vice president of High-Performance Systems. Joseph will lead the WHPS team's global research and consulting business and will continue serving as executive director of the HPC User Forum. Before joining IDC, Joseph spent 17 years in increasingly responsible positions with leading HPC firms, most recently SGI and Cray. He holds a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, with a focus on the strategic management of high technology firms.
• Addison Snell, former HPC (high-performance computing) product marketing team manager for SGI, has been hired as research director, High-Performance Computing, and will help IDC expand its capabilities in both the workstations and technical server areas. At SGI since 1997, Snell led key product launches and worked closely with customers, analysts, partners and media. Before that, he held management positions with an electronic publisher and a UNIX software firm. Snell received an MBA from Northwestern University.
• John Humphreys, research manager, has joined the WHPS team from his position as a research manager with IDC's Technical Computing and Infrastructure Program. Humphreys will lead IDC's workstation activities and will bring a new focus to the team with his background in blades, clusters, management, automation and virtualization software and as a user of HPC systems in the petroleum industry. A former exploration geologist, he focused at IDC on standard Intel architecture servers (SIAS), blades, appliance servers and quarterly server research. He also has expertise in risk analysis, and financial and technical modeling and forecasting. Humphreys received a B.A and M.S. in geology from Miami University and the University of Wyoming, respectively.

"Earl Joseph has a strong track record of success, and I'm confident he and his team will expand IDC's leadership in these technical computing markets," said Turner. "The markets IDC's WHPS group covers are strategically important in themselves. In addition, historically they have been the birthplace of innovations affecting the larger IT sector, such as RISC and parallel architectures, and more recently cluster and grid computing."

Under Dr. Joseph's leadership, Snell and Humphreys will join existing WHPS team members Dr. Christopher Willard, research vice president, and Nick Kaufmann, research manager.

A 20-year veteran of the HPC industry, Willard tracks and analyzes computer systems used in scientific and engineering environments, high-performance computer architectures, new technologies, user requirements, emerging applications, and vendor issues for the high-performance segment of the server market. Prior to joining IDC, he held engineering and senior analyst positions with Dataquest, GE/NASA Ames and Cray Research. Willard received his doctorate degree from the University of Minnesota.

Kaufmann is responsible for WHPS' market research, client inquiry, consulting and business development activities. He created the quarterly tracking service for the worldwide HPC market; heads research on systems priced below $250,000; directs end-users surveys on hot topics such as cluster and grid computing; and is involved in the HPC User Forum. Kaufmann spent six years in Prague for IDC East Central Europe and earlier worked for AT&T Global Business Solutions and Honeywell. He has an MBA from the University of Chicago.