January 17, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – SWsoft today announced that Mark Zbikowski, a former Microsoft Architect and pioneer software developer, will serve the company as Senior Technical Advisor. In this capacity, he will assist SWsoft as a resource to the development team and advisor to senior management.
While at Microsoft, Zbikowski led efforts in MS-DOS, OS/2, Cairo and Windows NT. In 2006, he was honored for 25 years of service with the company and the first employee to reach this milestone other than executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Zbikowski designed the DOS executable file format, used in MS-DOS executable files, and his initials "MZ" grace the headers of that file format. He is one of the main architects and developers of Windows NTFS, the most popular file system in use.
Today, Zbikowski is a lecturer at the University of Washington having retired from Microsoft in June 2006. He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard in applied mathematics and a master's degree from Yale.
"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."
"Mark's experience with the creation of system components for the most widely-used software in the world - Microsoft Windows - is highly relevant to our work," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO, SWsoft. "He is among the world-leading experts in system software and we look forward to his contributions as we deliver on our 'Optimized Computing' vision."
Paul Maritz, former Microsoft group vice president, said, "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."
SWsoft (soon to be renamed Parallels) is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers across all major hardware, operating system, and virtualization platforms. The SWsoft family of award-winning products currently optimizes more than 1 million desktops and servers for customers in 125 countries. Founded in 1999, SWsoft is a fast-growing company with 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia.
