Our Hosts

Cory Johnson is the Futurum’s Chief Market Strategist and the host of the Drill Down podcast.

His peripatetic career has seen him in prominent roles as a hedge fund portfolio manager and investor, technology journalist and broadcaster. He was CNBC’s first Silicon Valley correspondent and later helped create the TV show Bloomberg West for Bloomberg TV and the radio show and podcast Bloomberg Advantage.

Daniel is a visionary leader setting out to shift the high tech research and analysis business by delivering next generation insights, speed, and intelligence to the marketplace.

David Nicholson is Chief Technology Advisor at The Futurum Group, a host and contributor for Six Five Media, and an Instructor and Success Coach at Wharton’s CTO and Digital Transformation academies, out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business’s Arresty Institute for Executive Education.

Diana Blass is a journalist with a background in technology news and analysis. Her work has appeared on Fox Television Stations, The Discovery Channel, CBS News, CRN, Light Reading and across Informa-owned media brands. In addition to her work at The Six Five, she manages Diana Blass Productions, where she develops and produces digital documentaries, podcasts, and commercials for media and corporate brands.

Keith is a Research Director contributing to customer experience advisory service.

Krista Case is a Research Director at The Futurum Group. She focuses on data security, protection, and management, with an emphasis on how these strategies play out in multi-cloud environments.

Lisa Martin is Founder & Principal for LuccaZara Marketing and Productions (acquired by Futurum in 2023), CMO Advisor and host of “Marketing Art & Science.” Lisa is a regular on camera and is a veteran tech thought leader and strategy advisor who specializes in unearthing the most extraordinary aspects of technology, no matter how complex.

Mel Brue is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy covering modern work, HRM, HCM, and financial services. She has built a unique specialty working in technology and highly regulated spaces, such as mobile payments and finance, gaming, automotive, wine and spirits, and mobile content, ensuring initiatives address the needs of customers, employees, lobbyists, and legislators, as well as shareholders.

Mitch Ashley is a technology executive and entrepreneur who is an advisor, analyst, product creator and tech leader, bringing 30+ years in cybersecurity, cloud, AI, product development, software engineering and networking. Mitch is Chief Technology Advisor with The Futurum Group and CTO of Techstrong Group’s tech media platforms.

Mitch is a research analyst with a focus on emerging technology trends, primarily focused on data and information technologies and their use in multi cloud environments.

Patrick Moorhead is Founder, CEO, and Chief Analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy. He founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights)  in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics, including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors.

Randy is a key strategist in identifying major trends and shifts that occur within the IT Data Center and information technology market space.

As President, Signal65 Ryan ensures the company provides valuable insight on competitive analysis, performance marketing, product positioning, and real-world experience comparisons.
With a focus on in-depth testing and nearly two decades of hands-on experience, Ryan has created a breadth of knowledge in nearly all fields of hardware including CPUs, GPUs, AI/NPUs, SoC design, memory systems, storage, graphics, displays and their integration into client and data center solutions and platforms.
He spent five years at Intel serving in roles from competitive analysis, to owning client technical marketing, and driving product delivery in the client graphics and AI division. Prior to Intel, Ryan spent 18 years analyzing hardware and technology as the owner of PC Perspective and three years as the Principal Analyst at Shrout Research.

Ryan has worked with major technology companies and their product management teams at Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, NVIDIA, Arm, MediaTek, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, ASUS, Meta, Microsoft, and Adobe. His work has been cited and quoted by numerous technology news outlets and is a regular contributor to MarketWatch.

Ryan holds a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky.

Acclaimed cybersecurity researcher and advisor, Shira is a global keynote speaker and presenter, and expert media commentator. She joined The Futurum Group in February 2024 as President, Cybersphere.

Stephen is the President of the Tech Field Day business unit for The Futurum Group. An active participant in the world of enterprise information technology, Stephen currently focuses on AI, edge, and cloud, and is a long-time voice in enterprise storage.

Stephen organizes the popular Tech Field Day event series for The Futurum Group, bringing a panel of independent technical content creators together with leading companies in the industry. We organize our Field Day events throughout the year in different topics, and also bring our community to industry events. Stephen also hosts the weekly Utilizing Tech podcast, and contributes to numerous podcasts, webcasts, and industry news reports.

A graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he studied the impact of technology and society, Stephen has lived in northeast Ohio for a decade. He frequently travels to Silicon Valley for Field Day events and appears on-stage, in analyst and press panels, and behind the scenes at events around the world.

Steven engages with the world’s largest technology brands to explore new operating models and how they drive innovation and competitive edge.

Will Townsend manages the networking and security practices for Moor Insights & Strategy focused on carrier infrastructure providers, carrier services, enterprise networking and security. He brings over 30 years of technology industry experience in a variety of product, marketing, channel, business development and sales roles to his advisory position.

Before joining the firm, Will served as a management consultant for an early 4G marketing services company as well as Dell EMC and BigCommerce, focusing on sales enablement activities supporting both direct and partner sales functions.

Will also participated in the meteoric growth of Dell in the early to mid 1990’s. He was a business development professional tasked with accelerating the adoption of mobile broadband modems embedded in Dell Latitude notebook PCs through relationships between AT&T in the U.S. and Telus in Canada. He also helped launch the iconic Dell Dimension consumer desktop platform.

After Dell, Will joined Compaq and held global product management and marketing leadership positions in both the enterprise and consumer desktop client PC businesses in the run up to the company’s #1 market share position. Prior to Compaq, he held product marketing positions with Cyrix Semiconductor for its  6×86 microprocessor.

In his spare time, Will serves as a traveling mentor for the nonprofit Bpeace and has assisted numerous entrepreneurs with sales and marketing consultation in Guatemala.  He earned a BA in Economics from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Texas State University. Will is also a globally ranked analyst as measured by ARInsights.