Analyst Profile

Roles and Responsibilities

In his role as Research Director within the Security team at Gartner, Eric Ahlm has the charter to look broadly across the security marketplace. Looking broadly allows Mr. Ahlm to find fast-moving and disruptive trends that can impact multiple security markets, and identify market factors such as convergence growth, slowdowns or changes in competitive landscapes due to emerging trends. Mr. Ahlm's broad charter allows him to speak with enterprise buyers, security product and service providers, and investors worldwide about topical security issues and market movements. Lately, Mr. Ahlm has been following security trends such as advanced threat defense, mobile device security, BYOD, security virtualization and transformation in private and public cloud environments, security as a service (SecaaS), threat intelligence, security information analytics, telekinesis, incident response, and user authentication. Although Mr. Ahlm is often looking at emerging technologies, many of the trends that he follows come from observing disruptive forces in major markets, such as NGFW, IPS, EPP, SWG, SEG, user authentication, MDM, EMM, SSL VPN, DDoS and SIEM. This role allows Mr. Ahlm to help security vendors plan future investments that are aligned to the market direction, security buyers understand how emerging trends can impact their security programs or budgets, and investors understand global growth opportunities for security.

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