Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt Announce the Founding of Bromium

A new company that will target the intersection of virtualization and security.

Today Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt, founders of popular Xen open source movement and members of the Citrix CTO Office, announced they will be forming a new company called “Bromium” to target the intersection of virtualization and security. While we will obviously miss their day-to-day presence as employees here at Citrix, we’re genuinely excited about the Bromium vision and believe it will address some much needed industry challenges that are highly complementary to the Citrix virtualization, networking and cloud strategy.

Read Simon’s blog.

Bromium is still in stealth mode, so we are sworn to secrecy about the details of Ian and Simon’s next mission. Suffice to say, however, that they are working on some very cool technology that’s going to get a lot of heads spinning. That’s all we can say for now, but if you want some clues, you might want to check out Simon’s recent keynote at last month’s Citrix Synergy conference, especially his comments on security in the final third of the video (ok, no more clues…we promised!).

In addition to their work at Bromium, Simon and Ian will remain very active in many of the key industry initiatives they’ve been so instrumental in creating and shaping. Ian will continue serving as chair of Xen.org, and both will be active in key strategic initiatives like the OpenStack cloud project and the Open vSwitch project for virtual networking.

We can’t thank Ian and Simon enough for the incredible contribution they’ve made to Citrix these past few years. We wish them the best of luck in their new adventure and look forward to working with them closely on many equally exciting projects in the days ahead. And for all those Citrix blog readers afraid of missing your regular dose of Simon’s famous insight and wit, don’t be surprised if you see him showing up as a “guest blogger” for Citrix in the future.

Additional Information

The Citrix CTO Office
The Citrix CTO Office, chaired by Martin Duursma, is a virtual team of approximately twenty CTOs, technologists, architects and advanced researchers that spans the entire Citrix portfolio. Some members of the CTO Office (like Simon and Ian) have roles that involve significant external visibility, but most are focused on driving internal technology strategy, delivering strategic development projects, and ensuring architectural alignment and governance across the Citrix product portfolio. We believe this unique structure fosters innovation and allows us to focus CTO Office members on key strategic topics like security, mobility and collaboration that span our entire portfolio, rather than limiting them only to specific product groups.

We are constantly in the process of adding world-class technologists, architects and visionaries to our CTO Office and product divisions as part of our ongoing growth plans. In the coming weeks, we will be adding some key CTO Office hires from the outside to help continue the mission Ian and Simon have been working on, as well tapping the deep bench of incredibly talented technologists already at Citrix to step up to larger roles within the company.

Citrix and Xen
As an open industry initiative, the Xen movement has always been bigger than any one company, and nothing will change on that front. Citrix will remain highly active in all aspects of the Xen.org community, working closely with Ian, Simon, and the many other brilliant technologists who have made Xen one of the most successful open source projects in the industry. The next Xen Summit will be hosted in new Citrix Conference Center in Santa Clara, California on August 2-3, and will feature an opening keynote from Ian Pratt, along with technical sessions by speakers from a variety of leading organizations, including Amazon, Citrix, HP, Huawei, Intel, Oracle, Samsung and the NSA.