Citrix CTO Simon Crosby announced today that he is leaving the company to form a startup that has received $9.2 million in a series A round of funding  from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Crosby serves as Citrix CTO for data centers and desktop virtualization. He is a fixture in the cloud world. A well-known blogger in his own right, Crosby announced the news today in a post that gives a picture of his vision and what we can expect from Bromium, the new startup he is joining.

Crosby goes into some length about the state of cloud computing. The market is in a bit of confusion right now. IT is paranoid about security. There’s a perception that the cloud is insecure and can lead to more enterprise vulnerabilties.

Crosby says the opposite is true. And we have to agree.

Crosby:

Any credible cloud provider will do a better job of running their infrastructure via automation, than a human-powered IT org.  The most successful cloud service providers will  be those that can assemble the skill-set required to develop the complex software required to correctly automate the delivery of services across hundreds of thousands or millions of components – much like the few successful vendors of complex systems such as jet airplanes.

Slowing the cloud business is this race for who has the better cloud. That’s a losing approach. Crosby makes the argument that we need a Federal Aviation Administration type model that cloud services follow to give customers trust. It’s not about the better cloud. It’s about trust and differentiation on a commoditized infrastructure.

This is a common theme we hear from Crosby. In this excerpted interview with John Furier on The Cube, Crosby talks about OpenStack, the initiative started by Rackspacce and NASA to create the foundation for organizations to build their own cloud infrastructures. In this context, he discusses the need for commoditization and his usual sharp views about VMware.

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Crosby’s message is another good example of what service providers can do in this market. The future of the enterprise is encompassing that requires a complex automation. That orchestration best happens on a commoditized infrastructure with differentiation in the services provided, be they security or any other aspect of the enterprise.