Ronald W. Dennison is the founder and principal consultant of Research Development Consultants Incorporated. He is an outstanding technical contributor with a world-wide reputation in the storage industry. Ron has developed new products and managed research and development efforts at Memorex, Perkin-Elmer, Hewlett Packard, Unisys, Eikon, Toshiba, Quantum, Maxtor, TeraStor and MarQlin.

His record of accomplishments comprise a number of very innovative and successful products and processes. These have included some of the industry's earliest MR heads and plated and sputtered thin film disks, Maxtor's first double capacity drive, Maxtor's first 3.5" drive, Toshiba's first 3.5" drive, Quantum's self-servo writing system, etc. The technologies (heads, media, channel, servo and process) embodied in these and other products include a great many industry firsts. He was the technical founder of one of the first thin film disk companies, a pioneer in thin film (MR and inductive) heads and is a recognized industry leader in recording technology.

Ron is currently a very active industry analyst and specialist in the introduction of new technology. Current work includes magnetic modeling and analysis of future technology directions in data storage as well as activity as an expert witness in the areas of disk drive servo technology, hard drive failure analysis, and optical drive systems.

He is also co-organizer of two major data storage industry conferences that cover the latest technology in magnetic, optical and flash memories. These are the Storage Visions Conference and the Network Storage Conference.

Additionally, Ron is a Founding Director of IDEMA, the data storage industry association. The author of numerous technical papers and presentations, he has over 25 years experience in the data storage industry. He has been a consultant for more than 5 years.