Forcepoint has announced the promotion of Ryan Windham, Chief Customer and Strategy Officer, to CEO – succeeding Manny Rivelo who is retiring.
Windham brings 25 years of innovation and customer-first leadership experience in cybersecurity, automation and AI/ML to his role as CEO.
As Chief Customer and Strategy Officer, he was instrumental in leading critical cross-functional collaboration across Customer Success, Product Management and Go-to-Market functions to optimally align both the business mission and product roadmap.
Prior to joining Forcepoint in 2023, Windham was CEO at AppViewX helping to drive a 95% customer retention rate and 80% subscription revenue growth year-over-year.
He also served as CEO at Cedexis – acquired by Citrix in 2018
Earlier in his career, Windham held senior management positions at industry-leading security and infrastructure companies including Imperva, F5 Networks and Websense.
“Ryan’s strategic and innovative mindset will propel Forcepoint company forward through today’s exciting shift in business – utilizing and securing AI for competitive advantage,” said Brian Decker, Partner, Francisco Partners.
“This is a full circle moment for me, returning to lead Forcepoint after spending nearly a decade of my early career at Websense in corporate and product development roles,” said Windham. “I’ve worked closely with Manny to advance Forcepoint’s engineering in language models and generative AI, pushing data security innovation. I look forward to continuing collaboration across the company to help our customers and partners worldwide securely accelerate their transformation strategies for the future.”
