Virtualization software company SWsoft announced on Wednesday that a former Microsoft architect and pioneer software developer Mark Zbikowski has joined the company as a senior technical adviser. In this role, he will assist SWsoft as a resource to the development team and act as an advisor to senior management.

With the addition of this legend and 25-year Microsoft veteran to the team, SWsoft is truly providing themselves with a huge feather in their cap. Zbikowski previously led Microsoft's efforts in MS-DOS, OS/2, Cairo and Windows NT. Zbikowski designed the DOS executable file format, and he was one of the main architects and developers of the Windows file system, NTFS. Since his retirement from Microsoft in 2006, Zbikowski has been a lecturer at the University of Washington.

With rumors about IPO and acquisition in the air, perhaps the recent successes that SWsoft/Parallels has been having was enough to entice this legend back into corporate America.

"The SWsoft culture is reminiscent of Microsoft during its exciting formative years; a young, high-energy company with enormous potential to have significant impact on transforming the way IT is used to help consumers and businesses worldwide," said Zbikowski. "I'm very much looking forward to getting started with helping SWsoft continue to develop world-class virtualization, management and automation software."

This was also news worthy enough to get a response from another former key Microsoft player, Paul Maritz, former Microsoft group vice president. "Mark has been a key developer and architect over the past 20 years on the entire family of Microsoft operating systems from MS-DOS to Windows NT. He has the perspective and experience to be a great asset to any player in the systems software business."

Having the assistance and input from one of the world's leading authorities on Microsoft and system software on the team should help SWsoft/Parallels deliver on their "Optimized Computing" vision.

Posted by David Marshall on January 19, 2008 09:39 AM