Citrix’s CTO for the Data Center and Cloud Division, Simon Crosby just announced that he is leaving Citrix together with Ian Pratt, Chairman of Xen.org and VP of Advanced Virtualization products, to start a new Company called Bromium Inc, together with Guarav Banga, the creator of Phoenix Hyperspace. Crosby and Pratt joined Citrix after Citrix acquired XenSource Inc in August 2008.
While Crosby did not enclose the technology or products that Bromium is going to deliver, he did say that Bromium isn’t planning to compete with any excisting virtual infrastructure or security vendor. Crosby says: "We are fusing deep virtualization and security systems DNA to build a powerful set of tools that can offer continuous endpoint protection".
The investors in Bromium are: Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and George Kurtz, CTO and EVP at McAfee will be added as a board member, which tells us there is some involvement from McAfee as well.
Both Crosby and Pratt will remain active in the Xen.org, OpenStack.org, OpenVSwitch.org, the Open Networking Foundation and other projects they currently participate in.