Thomas Kennedy
Chairman and CEO
Thomas Kennedy, Raytheon CEO, Chosen to 2017 Wash100 for Cyber Market Pursuit Leadership
Executive Mosaic is glad to announce Raytheon Chairman and CEO Thomas Kennedy as the latest inductee into the 2017 Wash 100 — Executive Mosaic’s annual selection of the government contracting arena’s most influential voices.
Kennedy has led the Waltham, Mass.-based defense contractor since Spring 2014, when he succeeded the now-retired chief executive William Swanson after the latter’s 11-year tenure at the helm.
Raytheon generated nearly $24 billion in revenue for 2016 to represent a 3-percent increase from the prior year period partly on higher sales to international customers of the company’s Patriot missile defense system and Paveway bombs.
The company’s guidance for 2017 has revenue in the range of $24.8 billion-$25.3 billion on expectations of growth in the company’s integrated defense systems, missile systems, space and Forcepoint businesses in 2017.
Forcepoint relaunched under its current brand in January 2016 from the former Raytheon | Websense name as a cybersecurity product joint venture owned 20 percent by former Websense owners Vista Equity Partners and the remaining 80-percent stake with Raytheon.
Austin, Texas-based ForcePoint reported close to 22,000 customers worldwide in the public and private sectors at the time of its relaunch and Kennedy told investors in January the venture is transitioning from a client base in the small-to-medium enterprise area to the larger end of the spectrum.
“We had some significant uptick in being able to achieve bookings and sales with large enterprises and very large enterprises last year and that looks like that’s continuing into 2017,” he said then.
“We’ve developed some new products, especially relative to behavioral analytics, that we believe will be very unique to the marketplace, but also something that can help sustain businesses in terms of their attacks against the whole cyber threat area.”
Forcepoint houses its federal headquarters in Herndon, Va. with a focus on taking commercial products to government customers as Raytheon’s intelligence segment handles highly-classified work for the Defense Department and other security agencies, Kennedy told investors in October.