About Randy Kerns

Randy Kerns is the chief technology officer for Prostor Systems in . In his role as Chief Technology Officer, Randy drives the company's strategic direction for products and technology. As an industry veteran and former storage industry analyst, Mr. Kerns has spent over 30 years in the computer industry helping storage companies design and develop storage system products for their markets as well as advising technical professionals on how to build the best storage infrastructures to streamline their business processes.

Prior to joining ProStor Systems, Mr. Kerns served as an independent industry analyst covering storage and storage management software including SAN and NAS analysis. As a senior partner with the Evaluator Group, he was responsible for product analysis and company evaluation. While there, he became recognized in the storage industry for assisting major end-user clients in developing their storage strategies as well as supporting storage system vendors with their product and technology roadmaps.

Mr. Kerns spent many years in executive level product planning and design positions. He was vice president of storage strategy and planning at Sun Microsystems; he developed disk and tape systems for mainframe attachment at IBM and Storage Tek; he designed disk systems for attachment to open systems and proprietary computer platforms at Fujitsu and Tandem Computers; and he developed tape and disk systems for two start-up companies.

Mr. Kerns earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Missouri at Rolla and a master's degree in engineering computer science from the University of Colorado.

An educator and presenter, Mr. Kerns has written numerous industry articles and papers and is the author of Planning a storage strategy, a new book that offers step-by-step guidance on how to build an information storage strategy as part of a larger business process and most recently is the author of Information Archiving - Economics and Compliance, which is the first book of its kind to explore archiving of information in depth. Mr. Kerns has regularly taught classes on storage technology in the United States and Europe.