Gilles Gravier - Biography


Gilles is Director and a senior open source and InnerSource strategy advisor in Wipro's Open Source Program Office. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, he provides open source, InnerSource, blockchain and metaverse strategy consulting and advisory services to Wipro's key customers worldwide.

He has a pragmatic approach to open source, and regularly advises global companies, start-up, and venture capitalists on open source strategy, licensing issues, business models... He also believes strongly that metaverse technologies, likely based on blockchains, will be a natural part of the IT landscape of the coming decades, enabling a fully collaborative and distributed services world. He is also a user of Bitcoin and is convinced that crypto currencies will be a key to tomorrow's shared economy models.

Prior to that, Gilles was Director of Product Management for the Quantum-Safe Network Encryption Solutions (including Quantum Key Distribution Servers) product lines, as well as for the Quantum Random Number Generators, at ID Quantique, a company that is the leader in high-performance multi-protocol network encryption, based on conventional and quantum technologies, and aiming at providing future-proof encryption for data requiring long term protection.

During his career, Gilles has always been involved in both security and open source. In particular in roles such as Chief Technology Strategist for Security and Open source at Sun Microsystems, advising the largest accounts globally on their IT security strategy as well as their open source activities. He moved on to develop global market and business development strategies for open source and security in the public sector still at Sun and then Oracle. He has been active as a technology evangelist, in particular for these companies, around cryptography, DRM, open source and open standards.

He has worked extensively with venture capitalists as a strategic adviser for their due diligence process on IT start-ups, and is member of the boards (advisory or directors) of several start-ups.

As a regular speaker at industry events as well as often being interviewed, there are multiple recordings where you can see Gilles in action. A collection is available here.

In December 2012, he co-founded Why Open Computing!, a Swiss company focusing on selling sustainable laptops that can be user-serviced and community supported for years on.

He is former CISSP #91529, member of the Open Invention Network, April, and FSF Europe Fellowship.

He posts on his blog on Medium and has a LinkedIn profile where you can find more about his activities.

Gilles is a passionate photographer and travels either with his Canon EOS 6D or PowerShot G7 X Mark III. He also shares his interest in astronomy with the neighboring elementary school children.

Combining his passion for photography and music, he is president and co-founder of La Compagnie Divague, a non for profit organization that aims a promoting lyrical arts to all audiences, all ages, all social groups.

Photo Gilles Gravier
(click on this image for high resolution version)