Virtualization Industry Shakeup

Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt Leave Citrix to Form Bromium

Attempting to be a reporter today... Simon Crosby, previously the CTO of Citrix System announced today that himself, Ian Pratt, previously VP of Engineering of Citrix Systems and Chairman of Xen.org, and Gaurav Banga, creator of Phoenix Hyperspace are launching a new startup, Bromium, Inc.

The company has a solid list of board members including Peter Levine (Andreeseen Horowitz), Frank Artale (Ignition Partners), George Kurtz (global CTO and EVP at McAfee), and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company's website only lists news that they have raised $9.2 million in Series A funding.

Simon's comments on the new company:

There is an urgent need to dramatically shift the odds in favor of the good guys, and I remain firmly of the view that virtualization can offer a new toolset that can help to deliver a more secure and trustworthy computing infrastructure.

Bromium is not ready to disclose its technology or products.  We are fusing deep virtualization and security systems DNA to build a powerful set of tools that can offer continuous endpoint protection. Bromium does not intend to compete with any virtual infrastructure or security vendor.  There is much more to tell, but we have a lot of work to do first.

This is a big announcement in the virtualization space and raises a lot of speculation about how Bromium intends to solve the security issues in cloud computing within the internal virtualization portion of a cloud. What do you think? Is there some magic idea that Bromium can capatalize on? I am curious about where they are taking the technology.

• Security
• Virtualization