Cisco man stays neutral in Red Hat-VMware battle

Update: This story originally said that VMware founder Ed Bugnion had assumed the role of CTO at Cisco. This is not the case. Bugnion is the CTO of Cisco's server access and virtualization technology group.

Ex-VMware co-founder and current Cisco man Ed Bugnion isn't taking sides in the battle between RedHat and VMware.

According to Businessweek, Bugnion was involved in a press conference where Red Hat execs criticized the VMware hypervisor, saying it's based on 15-year-old technology unsuited to modern day "cloud computing." But Bugnion remains neutral. "It's certainly a point that Red Hat would make and it's a point that VMware would not agree to," he said, according to Businessweek.

Cisco works with RedHat and VMware and other vendors on virtualization. "Pretty much every hypervisor under the Sun is supported on the UCS [Cisco's Unified Computing System]," Bugnion said.

Ed Bugnion was one of five people who created VMware in 1998. He jumped ship seven years later, going on to cofound and serve as CTO at Nuova Systems.

In 2008, Cisco bought Nuova, which became the network giant’s server access and virtualisation technology group. ®