Leadership
Andrew Wheeler
HPE Fellow, Senior Vice President and Director, HPE Labs
Cullen Bash
Vice President, and Deputy Director of HPE Labs
Ray Beausoleil
HPE Senior Fellow, Senior Vice President, Large-Scale Integrated Photonics Lab
Kirk Bresniker
HPE Fellow, Vice President, and Chief Architect
Nigel Edwards
HPE Fellow, Vice President, Security Lab
Puneet Sharma
HPE Fellow, Vice President, and Director, Networking and Distributed Systems Labs
Senior Fellow
Fellows
Ted Dunning
HPE Fellow, Vice President, Systems Architecture Lab, HPE Labs
Senior Distinguished Technologists
Distinguished Technologists
Former Directors
Mark Potter
Martin Fink
Prith Banerjee
Dick Lampman
Ed Karrer
Joel Birnbaum
Frank Carrubba
Don Hammond
John Doyle
Barney Oliver
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Executive biography
Puneet Sharma
HPE Fellow, Vice President, and Director, Networking and Distributed Systems Lab, HPE Labs
Puneet Sharma is an HPE Fellow, Vice President, and Director of the Networking and Distributed Systems Lab at HPE Labs, where he leads the company’s research in Edge-to-Cloud-to-Exascale Infrastructure, Multi-Cloud Resource Orchestration, AI for Infrastructure, 5G/WiFi, and Security. He has been a key driver of HPE’s innovation pipeline, delivering breakthroughs in software-defined networking (SDN), GPU virtualization, container orchestration, edge computing, WiFi, Private 5G, and AI/ ML systems. His work has resulted in major technology transfers and business impact across multiple HPE business units.
Since joining HP Labs in 1998 after earning his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Puneet has built and led high-impact research teams tackling complex challenges in networking and distributed systems. His early leadership was instrumental in integrating the OpenFlow SDN protocol into HPE’s switching platforms — laying the foundation for SDN’s global adoption in cloud and data center environments. He has also contributed to Internet standards, co-authoring IETF RFCs on multicast routing protocols and the UPnP QoSv3 standard.
A recognized global thought leader, Puneet has delivered keynote talks at leading venues including IEEE ICCCN, GHTC, the IEEE 5G Startup Summit, NFV World Congress, and IEEE LANMAN. His research has been featured in New Scientist Magazine and published in premier venues such as ACM SIGCOMM, USENIX NSDI, IEEE INFOCOM, and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, garnering over 16,000 citations. He has authored more than 150 research papers and holds 90+ granted patents.
Puneet was named an IEEE Fellow in 2014 for his contributions to scalable networking, SDN, and energy-efficient data centers. He is also an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and was included twice in the Tsinghua University’s AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars list (2020, 2021) for his decade-long impact in AI and networking.
He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and a B.Tech. in Computer Science & Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Puneet’s leadership continues to shape the future of AI-powered, distributed computing and networking infrastructure, reinforcing HPE’s role at the forefront of global innovation.