Leadership

HPE Fellow, Vice President, and Chief Architect

Kirk Bresniker is Chief Architect of Hewlett Packard Labs, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Fellow and Vice President. He joined Labs in 2014 to drive The Machine Research and Advanced Development program, leading teams across Labs and across HPE business units with the goal of demonstrating and evangelizing the benefits of Memory-Driven Computing. His current focus is accelerating the transfer of technologies from Labs disruptive development portfolio in order to drive differentiating value into existing product categories as well as create new offerings. Prior to joining Labs, Kirk was Vice President and Chief Technologist in the HP Servers Global Business Unit, the capstone to 25 years of innovation leadership in product development.

Joining HP as a PA-RISC system hardware engineer in 1989, Kirk has always been a part of HP and HPE compute team, focusing on high volume, low cost and modular compute platforms. Starting in 1997, Kirk began a decade-long research and development effort to develop novel new modular system architectures which would eventually become a new category of integrated hardware and software offerings known as Blade Servers. This early work was eventually refined and blended with the contributions of the combined HP-Compaq merger lead to become HP BladeSystem c-Class, the undisputed leader in Blade Server platforms. In 1999, he oversaw a complete re-vamp of the Business Critical Systems product line. Kirk oversaw the transformation of the HP-UX UNIX and fault tolerant NonStop to blades to extend BladeSystem to the mission critical market, culminating in the Superdome X mission critical X86 blade platform, the highest performing HPE Mission Critical ProLiant system created to date. It was also during this period that he led the earliest investigations into what would become The Machine Research program. His decade at Hewlett Packard Labs has been focused on bridging the gap between the ingenuity of global research and academic teams with the challenges of industrialization, integration and scale required to apply novel technologies to society’s most challenging problems.

Kirk currently holds 33 US and 10 foreign patents in areas of modular platforms and blade systems, integrated circuits, and power and environmental control. He co-chairs the HPE Responsible AI Ethics workgroup and led the drafting of HPE’s Ethical AI Principles. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a founding member of the IEEE Industrial Advisory Board, a founding member of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics Tech Ethics Advisory board, a past member of the World Economic Forum Global Futures Councils on The Future of Compute, Quantum Computing, Agile Governance, Technology Policy, and a current member of the WEF GFC on Novel Compute. He graduated in 1989 Cum Laude with a BSEE from Santa Clara University Honors Program.