John Sontag

Biography

John Sontag is the director of Strategic Innovation and Research Services (SIRS) at HP Labs. The SIRS organization is responsible for co-innovations that bring HP Labs, HP business units and customers together to accelerate research outcomes towards customer outcomes. In this strategic role, he is responsible for research investments in nano-technology, exascale computing, cyber security, information analytics, cloud computing, immersive interaction, networking, services, sustainability, social computing and commercial digital printing.

Prior to his appointment as director of SIRS, Sontag led the Technology Transfer Office at HP Labs, which is charged with speeding the transfer of research into products and services through multiple routes. Sontag was responsible for focusing on the brokering of technology transfer through three primary channels: product development within HP’s business groups, intellectual property licensing agreements with a third party, and via the venture capital community.

Sontag was previously the director of virtualization and data center architecture research at HP Labs, where the team focused on the architectural and operational impacts of virtualized servers, storage and networking and the impact of high-density systems on data center design. He also was the lead manager in the creation of a research and production data center at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., and Bristol, England.

With more than 30 years of experience at HP in systems and operating system design and research, Sontag has had a variety of leadership roles in the development of HP-UX on PA-RISC and IPF, including 64-bit systems, support for multiple input/output systems, multi-system availability and Symmetric Multi-Processing scaling for OLTP and web servers.

Sontag received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Research interests

Sustainability, data centers, systems, operating systems.