Bugnion graduated with a bachelor"s degree in engineering from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich in 1994 and a master"s degree from Stanford University in 1996. He had been a Doctor of Philosophy candidate in computer science at Stanford University prior to co-founding VMware.
Bugnion was raised in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was one of the five founders of VMware in 1998 (with his advisor Mendel Rosenblum) and was the chief architect until 2004. While he was chief architect, VMware developed the secure desktop initiative also known as NetTop for the United States National Security Agency.
Bugnion joined Cisco as vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco"s Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit.
He promoted Cisco"s Data Center 3.0 vision, and appeared in advertisements. He resigned from Cisco in 2011 and resumed his Doctor of Philosophy program of study at Stanford University, which he graduated from in 2012.
Bugnion co-authored papers on operating systems and platform virtualization such as “Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors,” in 1997. Bugnion is also an angel investor in startup companies such as Cumulus Networks.
His primary research interests are in operating systems and computer architectures, and he was a key member of the SimOS and Disco virtual machine research teams. He then became faculty member of the School of Computer Science at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
