Shari Lava is Group Vice-President, AI, Data, and Automation. Ms. Lava’s core research coverage includes the fast-evolving AI software market, as well as the Automation and Data foundations essential for deploying AI at enterprise scale. This includes deep analysis of market dynamics, adoption trends, and how these technologies converge to deliver superior business outcomes. She is based remotely in Toronto, Canada.

Previously at IDC, Shari led the integration and AI enablement research program within the AI, Data and Automation group, alongside the Small and Medium Business (SMB) program, enabling technology suppliers to better navigate the SMB ecosystem. Prior to IDC, she was Vice President, Marketing Intelligence at Greystone Managed Investments, an asset management firm, where she leveraged data analytics to drive success across the customer journey. Before that, Ms. Lava led the Vendor Advisory Services practice at Info-Tech Research Group, delivering actionable market insights to technology vendors. Earlier, she was a management consultant with Deloitte’s CRM and Information Management practices, specializing in implementing and integrating applications for clients of all sizes across diverse industries

Kathy Lange is Research Director for IDC’s AI, Data, and Automation Software practice, focused on Unified AI Platforms Life-Cycle Tools and Technologies. Ms. Lange’s core research explores the evolution and adoption of unified AI platforms that support the full life cycle of traditional, generative, and agentic AI. It analyzes tools, technologies, and platforms for building, training, tuning, and scaling AI solutions across their end-to-end life cycle. She focuses on how enterprises can leverage these platforms to scale AI responsibly, optimize AI software infrastructure for inferencing, and orchestrate composite AI applications. The goal is to provide actionable insights for suppliers and buyers to operationalize AI at scale.

Before joining IDC, Kathy spent over twenty years at SAS. She led Analytics Consulting, Analytics and Text Analytics PreSales, and Competitive Intelligence teams. Kathy’s expertise helped organizations gain value from analytics, data science, machine learning, and AI. She was a frequent speaker, presenter, and moderator at SAS’ Executive Briefing Center and at industry conferences. Her most recent role as Director of Competitive Insights examined key AI life-cycle competitors and market technologies. Competitive assets provided tactical and strategic insights for sales, marketing, and product management.

Megha Kumar heads software and cloud services research at IDC Canada. As a research vice president, Megha is responsible for managing and delivering projects across technology areas such as cloud services, enterprise applications, software and digital transformation for the Canadian market. She manages both the Canadian Software as a Service (SaaS) and Canadian Cloud Platforms (PaaS and IaaS) research programs in Canada

In addition to research, Megha has aided vendors with go-to-market engagements to improve market awareness and provide end users with essential guidance on technology adoption. She regularly interacts with CIOs and IT decision makers regarding their technology preferences, priorities, and concerns.

She originally joined IDC in 2007 covering the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey region, based out of Dubai, U.A.E. In her previous role at IDC, she regularly provided insights on market dynamics, vendor strategies, and end-user trends across the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey for both global and regional ICT firms as well as public sector organizations.

Megha presents at various industry and vendor conferences. She is often quoted in the media, providing opinions on technologies and market dynamics. She holds a Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Marketing from York University, Canada.

Rob Tiffany is Research Director within IDC’s enterprise infrastructure global research domain and part of the cloud and infrastructure services subdomain. He manages IDC’s Cloud Pulse research which delivers quarterly, voice of the customer insights from cloud buyers all over the world. Additionally, he leads research on global cloud adoption trends and strategies and delivers actionable insights to technology providers and enterprise decision makers. Based on his hands-on background of designing and building hyperscale cloud infrastructure, Rob is uniquely positioned to deliver guidance on the public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud infrastructures needed to succeed with next-generation workloads.

BACKGROUND

Previously, Rob was Vice President and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson, where he drove 5G connection management with the IoT Accelerator and contributed to global M&A activities. As Chief Technology Officer at Hitachi, he received the Presidential “Product of the Year” award for designing the Lumada Industrial IoT + Digital Twin platform. Spending most of his career at Microsoft, Rob was Director, Global Technology Lead, and co-designer of the Azure IoT cloud platform in addition to software engineering, product management, and architecture roles with Windows Phone and SQL Server.