Born in Bologna and expanded all over Italy and abroad, there is a company that has redesigned technological development for telecommunication, energy and railway networks. Identikit of SITE, a company boasting a turnover of €359 million employing over two thousand people. For FARE INSIEME, Giampaolo Colletti interviews Stefano Borghi (CEO at SITE), Massimo Carroli (Procurement & Supply Chain Director at SITE) and Eugenio Borghi (Sales and Marketing Director at SITE)
di Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Photocredit: Giacomo Maestri e Francesca Aufiero.
Even the most technological of businesses have elements that take us back in time, to a world made up of stamps, papers and signatures. This is the history of Site: in its historical archive, there is a document - now scanned and digitised - issued by the local notary archives. The year was 1947 and Sauro Borghi and Roberto Carroli - two visionaries, dreamers "inspired by progress" and projected towards the future - started the entrepreneurial dream of S.I.T.E., acronym for Società Impianti Telefonici ed Elettrici (Company for Phone and Electrical Systems). This was the first post-war period, characterized by the reconstruction - starting from the foundations to help Italians survive. Yet, among those essential goods, Borghi and Carroli had identified the transmission and communication technologies right from the start. How much future there was in that past. Because today, it is almost a given fact that connectivity is a primary necessity, almost like eating or drinking. But, at the time, this was something pioneering. Everything started with a healthy obsession: spreading the best of the technical-scientific advancements of the time. And a lot has been achieved in over seventy years of commitment towards the technological development of telecommunications, energy and railway networks in our country. That experimental strength has always characterised the history of the company. It is not by chance that, in the early 1990s, SITE was among the companies involved in the birth of Omnitel as a partner for Pronto Italia, the company that won the first alternative concession to the incumbent, de facto interrupting the monopoly of telecommunications. “We were a small part of the capital that determined that success story, but it was team-working that involved technical, financial and human aspects and that saw foreign investors involved too. It enabled us to enter the mobile radio sector, where we continued to play a leading role on the market,” recalls Stefano Borghi, CEO of SITE and the second generation managing the company.
Technologies and integrations. Today, SITE reaches beyond the national border and operates on an international level supplying services for the integration of technological systems and state-of-the-art proprietary solutions. We are talking about System Integration for the manufacturing of infrastructure and technological systems. The areas of activity of this Bologna-born business are telecommunications, railway signalling, energy networks and technological systems. They deal with design, set-up and maintenance activities. “Every day, we have people and means that can reach anywhere, even the most remote, to bring the benefits of technology,” stresses Stefano Borghi.
The figures are a testimony to a success story - in 2019, the turnover was €286 million, which grew to €306 million in 2020 and €359 in 2021. But, in these years characterised by the emergency caused by the pandemic and a systemic crisis, the investment in human capital has also grown. So the company has gone from almost 2000 employees in 2019 to 2249 people in 2021, mainly graduates in scientific studies, therefore technicians and engineers or site operators. “We deal with hardware and software. Our highly skilled personnel work in various fields: from optic fibre splicing, to software platforms for the Internet of Things. At the basis of this, there is the continuity in the company approach and the ongoing relationship with clients. Everything is based on listening and getting involved when new adventures start. Because we have always thrown our hearts beyond the obstacle: this is where consistent diversification is born that requires technological and organisational commitment”, affirms Borghi. But the story of this business intertwines with the inevitable technological evolution. Because technology changes depending on the historical phase and on the needs - albeit latent - of clients, new markets and, now more than in the past, on environmental and social constraints. “Technology has changed because we have changed as individuals. Our attention used to be fully focused on fixed networks, then there was the significant growth of mobile radio networks ending with a scenario where distinguishing them seems obsolete. We are now working on a vast optic fibre network with various access systems - from mobile radio, to fixed to satellite. Interconnected objects that open up to new interconnection potentials then also became part of the context,” highlights Stefano Borghi. Different technologies that need to interconnect and dialogue with one another. It is a bit as though we were finding ourselves in front of a Babel of different languages that need a common translator to enter into a dialogue. “Interoperability is key and is required by hardware, software and services. Today, those producing hardware and software need to base their requirements precisely on interoperability, i.e. on integration. After all, there is something that makes us stand out: being specialized in managing complexity, nowadays is the real enabling factor of all the large innovation projects undertaken by our clients. We support them in setting up infrastructures and integrating systems providing management software solutions,” explains Eugenio Borghi, Sales and Marketing Director at SITE.
People first. Creating connections, reducing the digital gap, guaranteeing safer travels, using energy resources sustainably - these are SITE's objectives. An identity manifesto for future challenges. “To do all this, we need to bet on human capital, which in turns generate technological capital. Today, we operate in an ecosystem of open innovation and employ strategic and external partnerships for new market solutions. We aimed at diversification thanks to investments in new companies, start-ups and close partnerships with the academic world. With ideas and courage, we can open up new roads and travel along them,” states Massimo Carroli, Procurement & Supply Chain Director at SITE. The future is made of pervasive connectivity, an increase in transmission systems and sensors. Everything characterised by energy saving and production from renewable sources. After all, at SITE, we have already entered this transformation cycle and, once again, we must write tomorrow together.
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