The current market is dominated by Type 2 hypervisors, which run as an application on top of the operating system. Citrix and Intel on a bare-metal, or Type 1, hypervisor for client PCs, and one of its own the second half of this year.

Vendors say bare-metal hypervisors will be more secure than today's model because they are independent of the client OS, and will run faster because they let applications run on the local client rather than a remote server.

Neocleus, which was founded in 2006 and emerged from stealth mode nine months ago, was "really the first to make a stance and put a bare-metal hypervisor on the device," says Forrester analyst Natalie Lambert.

Neocleus debuted last year with Trusted Edge, a US$79-per-device product that lets end points securely connect to corporate data center resources. Neocleus will go into beta the last week of March with its full platform, code-named Mako, and then ship in May or June, says chief marketing officer William Corrigan.

Neocleus' headquarters are in New Jersey, but nearly all of the company's 35 employees, including its CEO, are based in Tel Aviv, Israel. CEO and co-founder Ariel Gorfung was previously CEO of Intuwave, a UK company that made middleware for the Symbian mobile OS. CTO and co-founder Etay Bogner previously founded security vendor SofaWare, which was acquired by Check Point.