AIWatch.

Rob Strechay, until recently managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research, has joined VentureBeat as our first Lead Analyst and a founding analyst of VentureBeat Research. His arrival is the next step in a deliberate move at VentureBeat toward deeper specialization: analysis built for the technical decision-makers — the directors, VPs, CIOs, and CTOs — who are evaluating, buying, and deploying enterprise AI.

The enterprise AI stack is being rewritten in real time, and the decision-makers I talk with are starved for objective, defendable data. Rob Strechay has the mix of technical rigor and operating experience needed to dissect the architecture behind the next phase of enterprise AI deployment.

The questions enterprise technology leaders are asking have changed. As organizations move past experimentation with generative AI toward production deployment, they want to know how to orchestrate multi-vendor environments, where the security gaps in their agentic pipelines sit, and how to fix the utilization problems draining their infrastructure budgets. Answering those questions requires more depth than news coverage alone provides, and that is the gap this research offering is built to fill.

An analyst who has sat on every side of the table

Strechay brings nearly three decades of experience as a practitioner, product executive, and industry analyst. Before becoming an analyst, he was an executive at numerous startups, including Zerto; he joined Amazon Web Services to help build a new analytics service; and he held executive roles across enterprise infrastructure. He later served as a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group and most recently as managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research and SiliconANGLE, where he hosted executive interviews and analyzed the evolution of cloud, data, and AI infrastructure.

Strechay will initially focus his coverage on cloud infrastructure, advanced data infrastructure, platform engineering and DevOps orchestration and observability, and the intersection points where AI and enterprise security collide.

Already at work: GPU utilization and the VB Pulse surveys

Strechay has already been contributing to VentureBeat's research. In May he published an analysis of enterprise GPU utilization, examining the compute waste sitting inside enterprise AI infrastructure, and he provided a substantive review of our AI Infrastructure & Compute survey before it went into the field.

His infrastructure-level focus complements the research engine VentureBeat has built around its monthly VB Pulse surveys, which track five areas of enterprise AI adoption: agentic orchestration, agent reliability and evals, agentic security and identity, AI infrastructure and compute, and context layers, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our June report on agentic orchestration, drawn from a survey of 145 enterprises, found that two-thirds of those enterprises had hedged their AI model strategy rather than committing to a single provider — a posture whose value the June outage of Anthropic's Claude models made plain.

VB In Conversation: The first vehicle

A core vehicle for this expanded research footprint will be a deepening of VentureBeat's existing VB In Conversation video interview series, which Strechay will host. Rather than high-level industry overviews, the series will bring architectural blueprints, actual deployment barriers, and back-end infrastructure realities to light through in-depth technical interviews with the architects and product leaders behind leading enterprise AI systems — an unvarnished look at which tools perform under production-grade pressure.

"VentureBeat has built an audience of enterprise builders and technology buyers that any analyst would want to serve," Strechay said. "My goal is to use deep empirical metrics and VentureBeat's proprietary tracking data to help enterprise buyers and the people building for them make sound platform and infrastructure decisions during the most disruptive transition enterprise technology has seen."

The expanded VB In Conversation series will appear on VentureBeat and on VentureBeat's YouTube channel, alongside Rob's written analysis on the site. Enterprise practitioners who want to take part in our monthly VB Pulse surveys, or arrange an analyst briefing with Rob, can reach the research team here.