John Webster Senior Partner for Evaluator Group

Evaluator Group Inc. announces the appointment of John Webster to the position of Senior Partner, effective October 1, 2009. In addition, Randy Kerns has been elected to Evaluator Group’s board of directors. Evaluator Group is an analyst organization recognized world-wide for insightful analysis and thought leadership serving the IT storage industry.

 John Webster brings to Evaluator Group over 30 years experience in enterprise IT spanning both mainframe and open systems environments. He is a featured speaker at Storage Networking World and co-authored a book entitled Inescapable Data – Harnessing the Power of Convergence in which he and co-author Chris Stakutis explore ways to converge wired and wireless data sources to yield new types of information. Formerly, he was responsible for directing Data Mobility Group‘s ongoing research and analysis in data and storage management. Prior to that, he was senior analyst and IT advisor for Illuminata, Inc. and has held analyst positions with IDC and the Yankee Group.

"Evaluator Group has a long history of serving both IT storage users and vendors," John states. "I look forward to helping Evaluator Group expand their areas of expertise into virtualization, solid state disk, and cloud computing." The addition of John Webster will enhance Evaluator Group’s local presence in the Northeastern United States.

 In another announcement, the Evaluator Group has expanded the Board of Directors with the addition of Randy Kerns. Mr. Kerns is a former Senior Partner with Evaluator Group and currently holds the position of Chief Technology Officer for ProStor Systems located in Boulder, Colorado. Randy Kerns has held a number of high profile positions with Sun Microsystems, StorageTek and IBM in the past. Randy has extensive experience in the storage industry providing analysis, recommendations and advising clients in developing storage strategies.

Mr. Kerns authored the book Planning a Storage Strategy which offers step-by-step guidance on how to build an information storage strategy. His most recent book release is Information Archiving – Economics and Compliance, one of the first books providing an analysis and explanation on the topic of archiving and the issues surrounding storage archiving.

"We are pleased to have John Webster join our team, and look forward to the valuable analysis he will bring to Evaluator Group. John is well known and widely respected for the clear, insightful advice he provides to IT users and vendors alike," said Russ Fellows, Managing Partner of Evaluator Group. "The addition of Randy Kerns is another valuable addition for Evaluator Group who will add strategic direction and guidance."

"As one of the founders of the Company I’m very pleased to welcome John to Evaluator Group and Randy to the Board. Evaluator Group is one of the very few analyst organizations that has provided important technical services to User Storage Managers and Vendor engineering and marketing organizations continuously for twelve years," stated Jack Scott, Chairman, Board of Directors.