William Johns — Senior Vice President of Development at HGST

Mr. William Johnson, also known as Bill, serves as Senior Vice President of Development of HGST, Inc. Mr. Johnson leads a globally dispersed development team in Japan and the U.S. in the development of products providing storage solutions that address personal computing to high-transaction enterprise applications in all global markets. He served as a Corporate Strategy Director of Surface Technology Systems plc since October 2007. He served as the Chief Executive Officer of Senior Systems Technology, Inc. since October 2004 and served as its President. He is a seasoned Executive and has a solid business and operational background with over 20 years of experience in major electronics manufacturing companies. With his background in technology, marketing/sales, and general management, he held leadership positions in operations ranging from virtual high technology start-ups to Fortune 500 high technology companies. Mr. Johnson began in the SMT technology development group at IBM Austin in the early 1980s and led the first major Lean transitions of the entire SMT business. Other companies where Mr. Johnson held major leadership positions include Allied Signal, where he led turn around efforts of 2 factories using lean principles and later led a consolidation team and at Western Digital Corporation, where he served as General Manager of their Consumer and Enterprise business. At Western Digital, he ran the Program Office for several years which held most of the execution elements of the business including Product Development, Materials, Supply Demand, Quality and NPI. He traces his hard disk drive industry roots to his years with Western Digital Corporation from 1998 to 2004. There he advanced from his initial role as Senior Director, Reliability, into several vice president or general manager roles. He was central to the success of the Raptor enterprise SATA drive, which became the its most profitable enterprise product line. When vice president, Program Office, he initiated and executed the program office concept to build core teams and develop leadership in each product family. As Singapore-based vice president, Asia Quality and Supplier Engineering, he established new quality benchmarks while reducing costs and improving on-time delivery. He served as a Director of Surface Technology Systems plc. He also holds multiple patents for hard disk drive development. Mr. Johnson has a Ph.D. in Metallurgical Engineering and M.S in Electrical Engineering. He holds a BS degree in Physics from the University of Texas-Pan American and a BSME in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University.