David Merrill
Chief Economist
Hitachi Data Systems

Mr. Merrill's responsibilities as the Chief Economist and Global Business Consultant in the CTO (technology office) organization, are to work with Hitachi Data Systems largest global and strategic clients with specialization in strategic planning, advanced storage architectures and storage economics. His working knowledge of storage and storage networks is folded back into product strategies, service developing and solution opportunities for the product marketing and professional services group. David has developed Storage and SAN-related services, award-winning white papers and methodologies in the storage network marketplace for the past 14 years.

Mr. Merrill's current work has been specialized in predictive ROI and TCO methods for advanced storage architectures, in which several industry awards/recognitions have been earned. Current topical expertise includes Storage Economics, Reducing OPEX costs within Storage Infrastructures, and Storage Organization Planning. Additional work (writing portfolio and consultative experience ) has been developed for storage business, organization, architecture methodologies, best practices for SAN and enterprise storage management. David has authored several tools, methodologies and services related to Economic Analysis and OPEX reduction for HDS' Global Solutions and Services.

Prior to HDS, David spend 2 years at Amdahl as an open systems technical consultant with large consulting contracts in the Telco, Banking, Insurance and Government areas.He spent 11 years at Texas Instruments in various computer-aided design/engineering roles, IT and engineering management positions within the military weapons systems division. He holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University, and an MBA from California State University.