Monday Morning Blues – PSW #625

Demonstrating a unique mix of technical vision, marketing and business acumen, Philippe Courtot has repeatedly built innovative companies into industry leaders. As CEO of Qualys, Philippe has worked with thousands of companies to improve their IT security and compliance postures. Philippe received the SC Magazine Editor’s Award in 2004 for bringing on demand technology to the network security industry and for co-founding the CSO Interchange to provide a forum for sharing information in the security industry. He was also named the 2011 CEO of the Year by SC Magazine Awards Europe. Before joining Qualys, Philippe was the Chairman and CEO of Signio, an electronic payment start-up that he repositioned to become a significant e-commerce player. In February 2000, VeriSign acquired Signio for more than a billion dollars. Today, VeriSign’s payment division, based on the Signio technology, handles 30% of electronic transaction in the U.S., processing $100-million in daily sales. Prior to Signio, Philippe was President and CEO of Verity, where he re-engineered the company to become the leader in enterprise knowledge retrieval solutions. Under Philippe’s direction, the company completed its initial public offering in November 1995. Philippe also turned an unknown company of 12 people, cc:Mail, into the dominant e-mail platform provider, achieving a 40% market share while competing directly against IBM and Microsoft. Acknowledging the market leading position of cc:Mail and the significance of e-mail in corporate environments, Lotus acquired the company in 1991. In 1986, as CEO of Thomson CGR Medical, a medical imaging company, Philippe received the Benjamin Franklin award for his role in the creation of a nationwide advertising campaign promoting the life-saving benefits of mammography. Philippe served on the Board of Trustees for The Internet Society, an international non-profit organization that fosters global cooperation and coordination on the development of the Internet. French and Basque born, he holds a master’s degree in physics from the University of Paris, came to the US in 1981 and has lived in Silicon Valley since 1987.

As CEO, Sumedh leads the company’s vision, strategic direction and implementation. He joined Qualys in 2003 in engineering and grew within the company, taking various leadership roles focused on helping Qualys deliver on its platform vision. Since 2014, he has served as Chief Product Officer at Qualys, where he oversaw all things product, including engineering, development, product management, cloud operations, DevOps, and customer support. A product fanatic and engineer at heart, he is a driving force behind expanding the platform from Vulnerability Management into broader areas of security and compliance, helping customers consolidate their security stack. This includes the rollout of the game-changing VMDR (Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response) that continually detects and prevents risk to their systems, Multi-Vector EDR, which focuses on protecting endpoints as well as Container Security, Compliance and Web Application Security solutions. Sumedh was also instrumental in the build-up of multiple Qualys sites resulting in a global 24×7 follow-the-sun product team.

Sumedh is a long-time proponent of SaaS and cloud computing. He previously worked at Intacct, a cloud-based financial and accounting software provider. He also worked at Northwest Airlines developing complex algorithms for its yield and revenue management reservation system. Sumedh has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering with distinction from the University of Pune.

Sven Morgenroth is a security researcher at Netsparker. He found filter bypasses for Chrome’s XSS auditor and several web application firewalls. He likes to exploit vulnerabilities in creative ways and has hacked his smart TV without even leaving his bed. Sven writes about web application security and documents his research on the Netsparker blog.