Sphere 3D Corp. (ANY)

[Orion Nebula]

I decided to look into Bromium since Bookman paid them homage and their was some discussion of their approach during the podcast. It appears they were into the concept of isolating the operating system and applications (even isolating keystrokes) which would then run in native form much like I have read about with Sphere. Their primary emphasis was different though in that their focus was security.

Another interesting tidbit from the first attached article is the players who seemed to have had some direct impact on the technological leap made by Bromium including Intel and Mirosoft. Big funding support from Andreessen Horowitz - yep that is the same Marc Andreessen who wrote about "software eating the world." Which is exactly the Sphere approach as I see it, although there is some hardware involved too.

Makes you wonder if Bromium couldn't see the forest for the trees regarding security versus the larger focus that Sphere has. It is interesting to note what is considered the desktop holy grail in the first article - "a system that is trustworthy by design" which is completely different than listening to Bookman discussing whether there is really a need for a desktop at all. Seems the two companies went in different directions. It is the vision thing and our guys have that down pat.

I do wish I had more info on their IP versus Sphere, meaning patents versus the "secret sauce" that is actually up for grabs for anyone who can figure it out. I am hopeful that the security approach is so different from all that Sphere does that we are light years ahead of them. I think we are but I really do not understand much about what is involved (seems few do). One thing I do know is that we are now positioned from end to end, desktop to storage, which is a lot more than the Bromium focus on security.

I also attached a second article from Wikipedia, that has some good info as well.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/bromiums-microvisor-promises-to-end-pc-desktop-security-woes/5013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromium