VIRTUALIZATION

practices should be. While the participants might not always agree with each other, we hope their insights will help IT managers navigate the virtualization landscape and make informed decisions on how best to use the technology. Next month we will present part two of this forum, discussing such topics as clouds and virtualization, using virtualization to streamline desktop delivery, and how to choose appropriate virtual-machine platforms and management tools.

 

PAR TICIPAN TS Photography by Jason Gardner

MACHE CREEGER (moderator) is a longtime technology industry veteran based in Silicon Valley. Along with being an ACM Queue columnist, he is the principal of Emergent Technology Associates, marketing and business development consultants to technology companies worldwide. TOM BISHOP is CTO of BMC Software.

Prior to BMC, he worked at Tivoli, both before and after its initial public offering and acquisition by IBM, and at Tandem Computers. Earlier in his career Bishop spent 12 years at Bell Labs’ Naperville, Illinois, facility and then worked for Unix International. He graduated from Cornell University with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in

computer science. SIMON CROSBY is the CTO of the Virtualization Management Division at Citrix. He was one of the founders of XenSource and was on the faculty of Cambridge University, where he earned his Ph.D. in computer science. Crosby grew up in South Africa and has master’s degrees in applied probability and com-

puter science.

GUSTAV is a pseudonym required by the policies of his employer, a large financial services company where he runs distributed systems. Early in his career, Gustav wrote assem-

bler code for telephone switches and did CAD/CAM work on the NASA space station Freedom. He later moved to large-system design while working on a government contract and subsequently worked for a messaging and security startup company in Silicon Valley, taking it public in the mid-1990s. After starting his own consulting firm, he began working at his first large financial firm. Seven or eight years later, he landed at his current company. ALLEN STEWART is a principal program manager in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. He began his career working on Unix and Windows operating systems as a system programmer and then moved to IBM, where he worked on Windows systems integration on Wall Street. After IBM, Stewart joined Microsoft, where for the first six years he worked as an architect in the newly formed Financial Services Group. He

then moved into the Windows Server Division engineering organization. His primary focus is virtualization technologies: hardware virtualization, virtualization management, and application virtualization. Stewart is a Microsoft Certified Architect and is on the board of directors of the Microsoft Certified Architect Program. STEVE HERROD is the CTO of VMware, where he has worked for seven years. Prior to that, he worked for EDS and Bell Northern Research. Earlier in his career he studied with Mendel Rosenblum, the founder of VMware, at Stanford and then worked for TransMeta, a computer hardware and software emulation company.

STEVE BOURNE is chair of the ACM

Professions Board. He is also a past president of ACM and editor-in-chief of the ACM Queue editorial advisory board. A fellow alumnus with Simon Crosby, Bourne received his Ph.D. from Trinity College, Cambridge. Bourne held