Startup aims to secure application clouds and virtual desktops
Former Citrix CTO Simon Crosby talks about his new company Bromium, whose technology isolates malware and provides continuous endpoint protection
Follow @infoworldLast week at the GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco, Simon Crosby, the former CTO of Citrix Systems' data center and cloud division, announced the eyebrow-lifting news of his departure from Citrix, along with Ian Pratt, chairman of Xen.org and co-founder of XenSource. The two have decided to leave Citrix in order to form a new stealth company called Bromium.
Crosby and Pratt are joined by Gaurav Banga, the former CTO and senior vice president of Phoenix Technologies, who led the creation of two new product lines: HyperSpace, a new platform for instant-on and power efficient computing, and FailSafe, a cloud-based antitheft and device management system for the PC. Banga will serve as the new stealth company's president and CEO, Crosby as CTO, and Pratt will be senior vice president of products.
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The stealth company also announced it had raised its Series A round of funding in the amount of $9.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. This round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz reunites Crosby and Pratt with former XenSource CEO, Peter Levine, who also becomes a Bromium board member.
Bromium may still be in stealth mode, but Simon Crosby did reveal a bit more information in what should be his final blog post as a member of the Citrix team. Crosby stated that Bromium is "fusing deep virtualization and security systems DNA to build a powerful set of tools that can offer continuous endpoint protection."
Crosby added one other interesting piece of information when he said that Bromium doesn't intend on competing with any of the virtual infrastructure or security vendors that are currently out there. That information should be pleasing to Citrix.
