Innovation drives progress in today’s world

Kirk Bresniker

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. 

Kirk currently holds 30 US and 10 foreign patents in areas of modular platforms and blade systems, integrated circuits, and power and environmental control. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a founding member of the IEEE Industrial Advisory Board, and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Futures Councils on The Future of Compute, Quantum Computing and Agile Governance. He graduated in 1989 Cum Laude from Santa Clara University with a BSEE and was also a member of the Humanities Honors program.