Edouard "Ed" Bugnion is a Swiss computer science professor at EPFL and a co-founder of VMware. Since 2025, he is Vice President for Innovation and Impact at

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (, EPFL) is a public university, public research university in Lausanne, Switzerland, founded in 1969 with the mission to "train talented engineers in Switzerland". Like its sister institution E ...

Biography

Bugnion was raised in

Neuchâtel Neuchâtel (, ; ; ) is a list of towns in Switzerland, town, a Municipalities of Switzerland, municipality, and the capital (political), capital of the cantons of Switzerland, Swiss canton of Neuchâtel (canton), Neuchâtel on Lake Neuchâtel ...

Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...

. Bugnion was one of the five founders of VMware in 1998 (with his advisor

Mendel Rosenblum Mendel Rosenblum (born 1962) is a professor of computer science at Stanford University and co-founder of VMware. Early life Mendel Rosenblum was born in 1962. He attended the University of Virginia, where he received a degree in mathematics. Whi ...

) and was the chief architect until 2004. While he was chief architect, VMware developed the secure desktop initiative also known as

NetTop A mini PC (or miniature PC, nettop, or Smart Micro PC) is a small-sized, inexpensive, low-power, Legacy free PC, legacy-free desktop computer, desktop computer designed for basic tasks such as Web navigation, web browsing, accessing web appl ...

for the US

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and proces ...

. After VMware, Bugnion was a founder of Nuova Systems which was funded by

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...

, and acquired by them in April 2008. Bugnion joined Cisco as vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco's Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit. He promoted Cisco's Data Center 3.0 vision, and appeared in advertisements. In 2014, he became adjunct professor at the School of Computer Science at EPFL, Switzerland, where he is a Full Professor as of April 2025. He was Vice President for Information Systems from 2017 to 2020, and he was appointed Vice President for Innovation and Impact in 2025. Bugnion’s work on

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

and

platform virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of Virtual machine, virtual machines, Operating system, operating systems, processes or containers. Vir ...

includes his 1997 paper, “Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors,” co-authored with Scott Devine and Mendel Rosenblum, that won a SIGOPS Hall of Fame award in 2008; and

VMware Workstation VMware Workstation Pro (known as VMware Workstation until release of VMware Workstation 12 in 2015) is a hosted (Type 2) hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems. It enables users to set up virtual machines (VM ...

for Linux 1.0, that won an ACM Software System Award in 2009. Bugnion was elected an

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

in 2017. Bugnion is also an

angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible de ...

in startup companies such as Cumulus Networks.

References

Living people 1970 births People from Neuchâtel Chief technology officers 2017 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery ETH Zurich alumni Swiss company founders VMware {{Compu-bio-stub