Thomas Bittman is a vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner Research. Mr. Bittman has led the industry in areas such as cloud computing, virtualization and infrastructure evolution. Mr. Bittman invented the term "real-time infrastructure," which has been adopted by major vendors and many enterprises as their infrastructure direction. He has served as Gartner's lead analyst covering IBM and Microsoft, and he served for three years as a member of Gartner's Senior Research Board. In 2005, he earned Gartner's Analyst of the Year Award.