Edouard Bugnion

Although the concept of virtualization was first explored in the 1960s in the context of mainframe computers, it languished until Mendel Rosenblum and his students at Stanford University rediscovered the idea as a simulation tool for new multiprocessor architectures. Realizing that virtualization could be used for actual execution and not just simulation, Rosenblum along with Diane Greene, Edouard Bugnion, Scott Devine, and Edward Wang founded VMware Inc. in 1998. Rosenblum, Bugnion, Devine, Wang, and VMware's first employee Jeremy Sugerman then designed and developed VMware Workstation 1.0 for Linux, bringing virtualization technology to the Linux desktop, and creating a vibrant industry and research area around the technology.

VMware Workstation 1.0 spurred a shift to virtual-machine-based architectures, allowing users to efficiently run multiple operating systems on their desktops. In subsequent years, the virtualization technology first introduced by the awardees was adopted by large-scale data-center operators in order to increase the efficient and safe use of shared computational resources. The broad and growing use of virtualization since the release of VMware Workstation 1.0 has caused the leading vendors of the x86 processor family to modify their designs to directly support virtualization. In addition to opening an important industry segment in virtualization technology, VMware Workstation 1.0 began a period of exciting new research in the areas of operating systems, networking, and software engineering.