Peter Tippett's bio:

Peter Tippett is vice president of security solutions and enterprise innovation for Verizon Business, with responsibility for driving the overall strategic direction of Verizon’s industry-leading portfolio of security solutions, including product development and marketing. He also serves as the company’s chief medical officer and is the chief scientist of the product testing and certification organization, ICSA Labs. An information security pioneer, Tippett has led the computer security industry for more than 20 years, initially as a vendor of security products, and over the past 16 years, as a key strategist. He is widely credited with creating the first commercial anti-virus product that later became Norton AntiVirus. Tippett is best known for his creation of enterprise IT metrics, and large risk intelligence and compliance management programs for enterprises.

Tippett took up his current role following the 2007 acquisition of security specialist Cybertrust by Verizon Business. Tippett was the founder of Cybertrust. He has also served as chairman of MD-IT, a rapidly growing health care information technology company, since 1998.

Before Cybertrust, Tippett was the chief executive officer of the NCSA, then ICSA Labs, and was chairman of TruSecure, the largest private U.S. security services company. In the early 1990s he directed the Enterprise and Security products group at Symantec. In addition to start-up and CEO positions, Tippett has led large software development, product management, production labs, technology research, and intelligence teams in his business career.

Early in his IT career, as founder and chief executive officer of software company Certus International, Tippett pioneered and commercialized a string of now-common technologies, including what is now called the “rescue disk,” code signing, trusted file execution, anomaly detection, and aspects of mail merge and the “un-do” command. He also created and sold the first cyber insurance to enterprises. Before the first PC was marketed, during the early 1980s, Tippett ran one of the largest open source, or shareware, bulletin boards.

Tippett served on the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (2003-2005) to guide U.S. efforts in health care IT, information security and computational sciences research. InfoWorld recognized Tippett as one of the 25 most influential chief technology officers for 2002. He also won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. Tippett is frequently quoted and has written many articles and papers on, enterprise information technology, health IT and information security. He was the publisher of Information Security Magazine for its first six years.

Tippett has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Kalamazoo College, and holds a doctor of medicine degree and a doctor of philosophy degree in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University. He has worked as an emergency room doctor and as a helicopter emergency physician in both Ohio and California, and still carries a current California physician and surgeon license. Tippett also worked for Nobel Laureates Robert Bruce Merrifield (chemistry, 1984) and Stanford Moore (chemistry, 1972) at Rockefeller University. He began his career as a commercial pilot and flight instructor while attending college.

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