Dennis Byron

Dennis Byron has more than 30 years experience researching and analyzing all areas of information technology (IT) and information-systems use. He conducted software and systems industry research and analysis at the Datapro division of McGraw-Hill from 1991 to 1997 and IDC from 1997 to 2006. At Datapro he was involved with the creation of, and later managed, the Client/Server Analyst research service. In this role, he was responsible for researching client/server-related operating systems and development tools; communications software and middleware; and data-management products behind the client/server revolution of the early and mid 1990s. Byron joined IDC in 1997 to manage research into industry-specific applications, ...More and initiated IDC research into eCommerce, retail, and professional-services applications, and the automation of the services supply chain. In early 2003, he moved to conduct IDC's analysis of application and integration server software and related middleware, and the emerging market for business process management (BPM) software. Before he began research and analysis for Datapro, he spent 20 years in information-technology marketing at Bull SA and the former Data General Corporation. He has consulted in the deployment and marketing of technology ranging from CICS to simple RPC decomposition tools to the first ORBs to later generations of Tuxedo, to DCOM and IBM's Project San Francisco. Some of this research supported the commercial marketing of Multics in the 1970s, the launch of the "Soul of A New Machine" in the 1980s (the ‘machine,’ not the book), and business process reengineering (BPR) software in the 1990s. Byron has conducted over 500 specific information-systems case studies. He also was a contributor to Application Development Trends magazine and has written extensively on the IT industry standards movement, from the early use of PARS to the de facto and de jure agreements behind the burgeoning use of web services architectures and SOA.