Will Townsend founded LoneStar Advisory & Research after nearly a decade spent at Moor Insights & Strategy. As the firm’s chief analyst, he focuses on semiconductors, cellular infrastructure, carrier services, enterprise networking, compute, universal communications, modern AI, and cybersecurity.
He brings over 30 years of technology industry experience in a variety of product, marketing, channel, business development and sales roles to his advisory services that span roadmap rationalization, messaging and positioning refinement, channel sales and marketing strategy, and thought leadership asset creation that encompasses video work, formal research papers, and contributed writing.
Core Practice Areas:
Networking
Enterprise and service provider including wired, wireless, subsea and optical
Telecom
5/6G mobility and broadband, non-terrestrial networks, UCaaS, FWA and carrier services
Cybersecurity
Network, cloud, application, data, identity, endpoint, observability and post-quantum
Data Center
Interconnects, compute, mainframe, storage, virtualization, power and sustainability
Semiconductors
GPUs, xPUs, Ethernet PHYs, switches, DSPs, retimers, front-end modules, high-speed ASICs
Modern AI
Agentic and generative AI applications and frameworks spanning runtime security and connectivity requirements
Before becoming an industry analyst, Will served as a management consultant for an early 4G marketing services company as well as Dell EMC and BigCommerce, focusing on sales enablement activities supporting both direct and partner sales functions.
Will also participated in the meteoric growth of Dell in the early to mid 1990’s. He was a business development professional tasked with accelerating the adoption of mobile broadband modems embedded in Dell Latitude notebook PCs through relationships between AT&T in the U.S. and Telus in Canada. He also helped launch the iconic Dell Dimension consumer desktop platform.
After Dell, Will joined Compaq and held global product management and marketing leadership positions in both the enterprise and consumer desktop client PC businesses in the run up to the company’s #1 market share position. Prior to Compaq, he held product marketing positions with Cyrix Semiconductor for its 6×86 microprocessor.
In his spare time, Will serves as a traveling mentor for the nonprofit Bpeace and has assisted numerous entrepreneurs with sales and marketing consultation in Guatemala. He earned a BA in Economics from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Texas State University. Will is also a globally ranked analyst as measured by ARInsights.