Philippe Courtot

Philippe Courtot is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Qualys, Inc. Demonstrating a unique mix of technical vision, marketing and business acumen, he has repeatedly built innovative companies into industry leaders. As CEO of Qualys, Mr. Courtot has worked with thousands of companies to improve their IT security and compliance postures. He 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. He is a member of the board of directors for StopBadware.org, and in 2012, he launched the Trustworthy Internet Movement, a nonprofit, vendor-neutral organization committed to resolving the problems of Internet security, privacy and reliability. Before joining Qualys, Mr. Courtot was the Chairman and CEO of Signio, an electronic payment startup that he repositioned to become a significant e-commerce player. In February 2000, VeriSign acquired Signio for more than $1 billion. Today, VeriSign’s payment division, based on the Signio technology, handles 30% of the electronic transactions in the U.S., processing $100 million in daily sales. Prior to Signio, Mr. Courtot was President and CEO of Verity, which he re-engineered to become the leader in enterprise knowledge retrieval solutions. Under Mr. Courtot’s direction, the company completed its IPO in November 1995. He 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. Lotus acquired the company in 1991. In 1986, as CEO of Thomson CGR Medical, a medical imaging company, Mr. Courtot received the Benjamin Franklin Award for his role in the creation of a nationwide advertising campaign promoting the life-saving benefits of mammography. He served on the board of trustees for The Internet Society, an international nonprofit organization that fosters global cooperation and coordination on the development of the Internet. French and Basque born, Mr. Courtot holds a master’s degree in physics from the University of Paris; he came to the U.S. in 1981 and has lived in Silicon Valley since 1987.