Citrix Co-Founder Ed Iacobucci Dies At 59

Co-founder of Citrix Ed Iacobucci has died at the age of 59. He fought a 16-month battle with pancreatic cancer.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1953, Iacobucci graduated from Georgia Tech Institute where he did systems engineering, before joining IBM in 1979.

Whilst there, he helped run teams working on IBM DOS and eventuallyled the OS/2 project, a joint IBM‐Microsoft effort  to create a multi‐tasking personal computer operating systems which was a technical success but a commercial failure.

Founded Citrix and others

Iacobucci turned down a role at Microsoft in 1989 and instead  founded Citrix Systems with $3 million in venture capital funding, serving as chairman and chief technology officer. He watched the company grow quickly, forging strong links with Microsoft to bring multi-user capabilities to Windows operating systems.

Iacobucci laid the groundwork for Citrix to go on to become a major force in desktop virtualisation. It is now led by CEO Mark Templeton.

Iacobucci left Citrix in 2000, co-founding another company – DayJet Corporation – in 2002. It took a cloud model to the airline industry, creating systems that he hoped would revolutionise the sector. But the company was not able to secure enough capital and by 2008 it had ceased operations.

But the entrepreneurial spirit never left Iacobucci. In 2009, he co-founded another company – the VirtualWorks Group, with the grand vision of creating a “new enterprise information architecture”, where any user can find whatever data they need, securely and quickly.

A celebration of his life is being held in Florida today, according to a note on his Twitter profile.

Iacobucci is survived by his wife, three children, mother, brother and three grandchildren.

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