Mendel Rosenblum

Made important contributions in the area of operating systems, addressing problems that new hardware architectures introduce. Academic contributions include: (a) SimOS, a system that simulates computer hardware with enough speed that it can boot and run any OS that runs on the hardware; (b) Hive, a kernel structure that partitions a computer into cells, such that all cells export an image of a single machine; and (c) Disco, a simple virtual machine monitor that runs multiple copies of traditional operating systems. All systems have been very influential, in academia and in industry. Co-founded VMware in 1998. The company is a provider of virtualization solutions for all classes of computers. VMware products allow a single computer to run multiple operating systems and applications, delivering significant improvements in efficiency, availability, flexibility and manageability. With 2012 revenues of $4.8 billion, a market cap of 35 billion dollars, more than 500,000 customers and nearly 14,000 employees, VMware is one of the fastest growing public software companies.