The first talk at Structure was given by Simon Crosby who announced his new company, Bromium.

Bromium Raises $9.2M Series A

Led by well-known industry experts, innovative virtualization and security company secures funding from leading venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners

SAN FRANCISCO (Structure 2011) - June 22, 2011 - Bromium, emerging from stealth mode to develop technology in the areas of virtualization and security, today announced it has closed a $9.2 million series A round of funding with Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Founded by Gaurav Banga, Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt, Bromium is focused on the delivery of infrastructure solutions that permit enterprises to safely embrace two major trends in IT: consumerization and cloud computing. The rapid growth of new device types and consumer-driven device, application and network choices, combined with increasing mobility and the need for “anywhere, any time access” to enterprise data and applications, poses a significant risk to the enterprise. Similarly, the rapid adoption of cloud computing leaves enterprise data and applications vulnerable to attack. Bromium’s technology will permit the development of a powerful set of solutions to these problems and will help provide a more trustworthy computing infrastructure.

The Bromium Board of Directors is drawn from business leaders and technologists with extensive experience in infrastructure software, virtualization and security: Peter Levine, venture partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Frank Artale, managing director at Ignition Ventures; and George Kurtz, worldwide CTO and executive vice president at McAfee. Bromium has already attracted top engineering talent from Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, McAfee and NVIDIA.

Small world moment. Frank Artale who represents Ignition Ventures investment in Bromium was one my bosses at Microsoft, and was one row in front of me on the flight from SEA to SJC. Frank also wakeboards on the same lake I live on in Redmond (Lake Sammamish). Frank is ex-Citrix exec so he knows the virtualization and enterprise space well.

Bromium is addressing the security of cloud applications.

Simon had a good slide on where things are.

And a cost of private clouds.

Simon had some great slides like this one with Apples and Oranges analogy.