Edouard Bugnion

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.[1]

Biography

Bugnion was raised in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.[2]

Bugnion was one of the five founders of VMware in 1998 (with his advisor Mendel Rosenblum) and was the chief architect until 2004.[3] While he was chief architect, VMware developed the secure desktop initiative also known as NetTop for the US National Security Agency.[4]

After VMware, Bugnion was a founder of Nuova Systems which was funded by Cisco Systems, and acquired by them in April 2008.[5] Bugnion joined Cisco as vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco's Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit.[6] He promoted Cisco's Data Center 3.0 vision, and appeared in advertisements.[7] 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.[8][9]

Bugnion’s work on operating systems and platform virtualization 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;[10][11] and VMware Workstation for Linux 1.0, that won an ACM Software System Award in 2009.[12] Bugnion was elected an ACM Fellow in 2017.[12][13]

Bugnion is also an angel investor in startup companies such as Cumulus Networks.[14]