One of the first consulting firms operating in the cloud computing sector in central and northern Italy was founded in Carpi, near Modena, in 2011. A story of excellence that blends technology and consultancy. For FARE INSIEME Giampaolo Colletti interviews Luca Bulgarelli, Sales Director, and Giuseppe Nale, CTO of Skybackbone Engenio
by Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Do you know
what one of the hardest things is when you decide to take the plunge and open a
business? Choose your name. That is, what you want to communicate, both to
yourself and to the market. I mean, we often have a very clear idea of our
business, its positioning, the products and services we offer, but the name
just doesn’t come. And so you let your imagination run wild. This is basically
what happened for a company from Emilia with its feet on the ground and its
head in the clouds. Or rather, in the cloud. A company whose backbone is IT,
but whose vocation is in that “cloud” that now means the future. We are talking
about Skybackbone Engenio.
Company profile We are in Carpi, the
most densely populated town in the province of Modena with a population of
seventy thousand. This is where the company, which today employs 27 people and
whose market is 90% Italian with around 100 medium and large enterprise customers,
was founded. Its market is all-embracing: manufacturing, retail, services,
finance, software houses. Its turnover is Euro 4.5 million and is growing by
+15% year on year through internal lines, without acquisitions. “It was all set
in motion in 2011 by a team with decades of experience supporting businesses
and managing corporate IT systems with a focus on ERP, CRM and e-commerce
applications. Each application has its own peculiarities and these must be
served by specific infrastructure and management services. Our technical team,
with 30 years of experience, has in-depth knowledge of the main applications
found on the market. We have developed ad hoc management services. Over the
years, our services have become multi-cloud for this very reason: each
application has its own specific cloud that allows it to perform better and in
a more secure way. All this while paying attention to costs,” says Luca
Bulgarelli, Sales Director of Skybackbone Engenio. The 54-year-old manager with
a long career behind him realised that the drive towards outsourcing would
return because companies were already opening up to the outside world in the
1990s and so, with Giuseppe Nale, Claudio Daolio and Enrico Ronchetti, he
decided to create this start-up. “At the time we were trailblazers. We started
out without a single customer and today the market is reaching out to us
because everyone wants to be on the cloud,” says Bulgarelli. The heart of it
all is data, the black gold of the new century for companies that want to
conquer the market and excel. “I never forget that when a machine breaks down,
it can be replaced, but that lost data can never be bought again, on any
market. So it’s crucial to protect them,” says Giuseppe Nale, CTO of
Skybackbone Engenio, a sixty-something engineer who began working in the 1980s
as a youngster - as he recalls - in the old world where large computers were
used. Four decades of technical experience. He decided to take this step when
he was in his fifties. “We thought we had good ideas and that we could
personally travel around and tell companies about them. Leaving top management
with the role of entrepreneur,” recalls Nale.
The power of the cloud. Back to the brilliant insight. Here, integrated solutions are designed
and implemented in step with technological innovations and artificial
intelligence. “We already had well established experience in outsourcing and
firmly believed that the cloud would be the new frontier of systems management.
At first many thought we were daydreamers, but soon the market proved us right
and we gained a competitive edge. Our services cover everything our customers
need for all-round management of their application infrastructures. We
guarantee continuity of service, performance, security, GDPR and regulatory
compliance,” Bulgarelli points out. This advanced IT engineering company has a
multidisciplinary team of electronic, IT and management and project management
engineers, with a sound background in databases and the most common cloud
infrastructures, security technologies and processes. A research and
development team develops automation tools for system activities to support
customer services. What about the future? It will still revolve around
technology. Nale is convinced of this. “Over the last forty years we have
witnessed the gradual computerisation of all business processes as well as a
rapid dematerialisation in favour of digital. This road is still long and will
continue. Although outsourcing is still in its early days, migration to the
cloud is steadily accelerating, driven by the growing offer of cloud-native
software. There is still much to be done in this area. However, it is important
to address the ethical and social challenges associated with this technology.”
Feet firmly on the ground and for sure, head in the clouds, but orientated
towards responsibility.
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
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