René Pluis joined Philips in March 2022 and supports hospitals over the world in the remediation of vulnerabilities in their medical devices and solutions. Next to this activity Pluis supports the SBoM processes at Philips to go to the next (automated) level.

Before joining Philips, René Pluis worked at Cisco for more than 17 years in various roles. The last 5+ years, René Pluis was the lead for Cyber Security in the CDA (Country Digitization Acceleration) program for the Netherlands (in Dutch: DVN – Digitale Versnelling Nederland). In this role he was responsible for raising awareness in the Dutch market about Cisco’s Cyber Security capabilities and to expand relationships with public, private industry and research institutes in the Netherlands with focus on Cyber Security and privacy at CxO level.

Prior to above role, René Pluis was a Global Manager Global Energy Industry, René Pluis was part of the Global Energy vertical group at Cisco. He focused on global business development and strategic development for energy industry solutions, to stimulate ‘net new’ growth and profitability for Cisco and that help Cisco’s support energy customers as they shape the future of their industry. The Energy vertical in Cisco includes the Oil & Gas and Utility Industries.

For the last 10+ years at Cisco, René Pluis has deployed worldwide best practices at customers working as a ‘trusted party’ consultant for mainly COO / CIO / CISO level of executives driving innovative solutions, aligning business strategy and IT strategy and solutions of global customers.

Prior to joining Cisco, Pluis worked at several consultancy firms as principal boardroom consultant like Capgemini, and Atos Origin. Prior to that Pluis worked at a company making HIS / PACS solutions for several years while he started his working career in the academic world of University of Leiden and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Pluis is a graduate from the Poly-technical University in Haarlem, The Netherlands, with a Master’s Degree in Electric Engineering – Technical Computer Sciences and a graduate from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, with a Master’s Degree in Medical Informatics – Analysis of Biomedical Signals. He worked on his thesis at the Human Genome project while working at MIT in Boston.

He further has both an MBA and an MBI from the Erasmus University / Rotterdam School of Management, both in Rotterdam the Netherlands.

Pluis has also several professional certifications among others the CISSP – Certified Information Systems Security Professional and GICSP – Global Industries Cyber Security Professional focused on cyber security management in both Enterprise and Industrial environments.

He is fluent in Dutch and English and has a working understanding of French and German.