Alan Howard

Mr. Howard has more than 30 years of experience in the information technology industry, including  hands-on technical, marketing, research and business management roles. He is frequently an invited conference speaker and adviser on co-location, data center and cloud markets and strategy.  Prior to joining IHS Markit, he was vice president and chief researcher for Wired Real Estate Group, a data center advisory firm. Mr. Howard was responsible for consulting to investors, investment banks, data center operators and enterprises to help them decide on IT workload placement in on-premises or off-premises DCs to select co-location providers, including negotiation support and contract review that often resulted in up to 50% savings. Significant projects for top tier investment banks included qualification of data center co-location space supply, developing demand forecast models, determining pricing dynamics in localized markets and forecasting pricing based upon market trends. In one case, his modeling identified a high-risk scenario and dissuaded an investor from making at $20M investment that subsequently was shown to have been a prudent decision. Prior to Wired Real Estate Group, he was president at Applied Computer Research, where he drove revenue growth by 40% through new product innovations and expanded customer engagement. In this role, he developed market models to help IT companies define size, qualify and prioritize target market segments for their IT products and services.