Jacques Blais

President & CEO

Jacques joined Fortem as President and CEO in January 2016, bringing 35 years of experience helping small and large companies achieve sustainable growth in complex and highly technical environments such as radars, building automation, aeronautics, telecommunication, and energy.

Directly accountable for financial results and growth throughout his career, he has successfully led professional, sales, technical, mobile force, financial and manufacturing teams; covered Canada, the US and Mexico; represented Canadian, American and European shareholders. He has sold, restructured, financed, merged and acquired businesses.

Jacques holds a Master Degree in Business Administration with distinction from the Richard Ivey School of Business (University of Western Ontario) as well as a Bachelor degree in Business Administration from Université Laval. He chairs and sits on many boards. In particular, he sits on Special Olympics Quebec board since 1997.

Christian Laforte

CTO (Chief Technology Officer)

Christian’s mission is to understand and solve today’s most challenging security problems, through innovative and intuitive technology. Since founding Fortem in 2005, Christian has consulted on security projects for airports, large cities, military bases, mass transit and royal palaces. Fortem recently delivered one of the world’s most ambitious security integration projects, covering dozens of military bases across an entire country, thousands of cameras, access control and tracking for vehicles and more than 1 million personnel, GPS, biometrics, video analytics and license plate recognition.

During the early years of Fortem, Christian and his team developed mission-critical 3D software for Google, Sony, Apple, Autodesk and the Canadian Space Agency. Christian previously lead 3D-related R&D projects at Autodesk and AMD.

Christian is a Software Engineering graduate of the École Polytechnique de Montréal and a co-inventor of 3 patents applying advanced 3D technologies to physical security.

Jean Sylvain

Director Research and Development 

Jean Sylvain has over 30 years of professional experience in organizational management, including nearly 15 years as a senior executive in the public sector. His expertise lies in the analysis of business, organizational strategy, managing critical projects and change management. In recent years, Mr. Sylvain was particularly interested in the field of organizational capacity development and management of organizational expertise.