Ian Pratt – Xen
Thursday, 03 February 2011
Co-Founder, Xen
Ian Pratt is Vice President of Advanced Products at Citrix Systems, and leader of the Xen open source project which he co-founded in 2001 with the aim of making virtualization ubiquitous on scale-out hardware. Ian has played a key role in both the architecture of Xen and the formation of industry partnerships that led to the emergence of Xen as the leading open source virtualization technology, used in millions of servers around the world and a key technology behind “cloud computing”.
Ian spearheaded the creation of Xen.org and now serves as chairman of the organisation. Ian was a founder and chief scientist of XenSource, which provided enterprise-class virtualisation products, based on Xen and was acquired by Citrix in 2007 for $500M.
He was previously a member of senior faculty at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, UK, where he led systems research for almost 10 years. Ian was also a founder of Nemesys Research, acquired by FORE Systems, and has consulted widely in the technology industry.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science and was elected a Fellow of Kings College in 1996.
