Analysts
Martin Marshall, President
As Managing Director at Zona Research, Martin was responsible for the Internet Server, Middleware, and Application Development analysis services. He also wrote approximately one-third of Zona’s daily wire service releases, as well as authoring numerous market reports and white papers. He joined Zona in 1997 as an industry analyst, was promoted to Director in 1998, and to Managing Director in 2000.
Martin’s insights are based on broad industry awareness coupled with in-depth technical experience, bringing the context of technology and industry directions to detailed knowledge. He has spent over 25 years as an entrepreneur, analyst, lab manager, editor, writer, and technologist.
In the 1980's he was founder and CEO of Enlightenment, Inc., which specialized in educational software. There, he created the Living Chess Library, the world's first database-driven chess tutorial program, and, through negotiations with the Soviet Chess Federation, was part of a movement that began to break down the commercial walls between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In the 1990s before joining Zona Research, he served as Chief Technical Editor at InfoWorld, Lab Manager at PC/Computing Magazine, and Senior Editor at CMP’s CommunicationsWeek/InternetWeek. As Usability Lab Manager at PC/Computing, he ran the first magazine-based usability lab in North America. As Chief Technical Editor at InfoWorld, he helped to start the InfoWorld Test Center.
In the 1970s, he was a science writer for Newsweek, Electronic Business and EDN, and Palo Alto bureau chief for McGraw-Hill’s Electronics magazine. He has done research projects for IBM, the National Science Foundation, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Sun, HP, and Microsoft. As editor of New Engineer magazine, he conducted interviews with Nobel laureates Linus Pauling, Eugene Paul Wigner, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, NASA’s Wehrner von Braun, and Senator Edward Kennedy.
He has also written five industrial films, including the 72-minute 1977 techno-cult classic, IC’s in Testingland, which he also produced and directed. His other films include Zilog!, Amdahl, The National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska, NSF’s Earthquake Hazards Mitigation Program, and DataQuest. He did post-graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a bachelors degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology, where he was also Poet Laureate.