“I left for the United States as a provincial Italian. After twenty years in Silicon Valley, I have grown a lot not only from a professional point of view but also from a human point of view”. Paolo Bergamo it was a brain on the run: flew to the other coast of the Atlantic right after the doctoral thesis, for Steve Jobs developed the first business app on the App Store. He later made a career at Salesforce working with Mark Benioff. Now that he is CEO and president of Over It, he aims to transform this Italian company into an attractive pole for engineers and researchers, reversing the course of fleeing brains. The goal is to recreate that innovative and ever-growing ecosystem of the Peninsula Silicon Valley, starting from Fiume Veneto (Friuli-Venezia Giulia), the main office of this company specialized in software solutions for the management of activities in the field: an expansion plan that aims to attract international talents, but also those many Italians who fled abroad looking for opportunities that our country has not been able to offer.
“We want to hire especially in Italy, strengthening the engineering and software implementation department. We have already recruited another 50 engineers, but we need to expand our staff to grow on new markets and expand the product portfolio”, explains the manager, specifying that “80 per cent of the new workforce will be located in our country and the remaining 20 per cent in offices abroad”. In fact, the company has about 580 people distributed all over the world and has several offices in Italy, including Milan and Rome, but also in the United States, such as Boston and Miami. After the spin-off from the Engineering Group which will be completed shortly, the company will become an independent entity controlled by the Bain Capital and Neuberger Berman funds: Paolo Bergamo has the task of accelerating its internationalization and growth process, with the intent to “make it an international hub where young professionals can grow and express their potential”.
A plan that has the ambition to bring to the Peninsula also those tech intelligence who work outside national borders, from the United States to India. In order to create an infusion of new knowledge and a sharing of experiences and processes in a multicultural and cosmopolitan space. “Just like the ones I met in one of the most advanced areas from a technological point of view”, continues the CEO of Over It, who does not give details on the costs of this plan as the budget is being defined, but assures: ” The project of attracting talents is not expensive, we want to create a simple model that is also based on the fact that mobility in some markets, such as the American one, is very strong since professionals often change jobs. These people want to have a new experience of international work: Over It wants to give them an opportunity to come and work in Italy, helping them to find a home and an international school for their children, providing them with a car for the period of stay “. A project that looks to everyone, not just the Americans, and which should start as early as next year.
Even on the investments necessary to promote the internationalization process and new hires, Bergamo is not unbalanced on the figures. But he explains that the plan is to create the world‘s leading software in Field Service Management through growing economic resources and strengthen the company’s positioning on international markets: “Now Italy represents only 4-5 percent of the world market for this segment. 40 per cent are collectively occupied by the United States, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom. “
A brain on the run that returns to Italy
Before leading Over It, Paolo Bergamo had held various roles in Salesforce in the management of divisions for the development of new products with a focus on mobile. Precisely in the company directed by Mark Benioff, he specialized in Field service management software that offers support for the execution of field work in various operational areas: “This is a critical area, just to give an example: if not you can do proper maintenance of the electricity distribution, you can shut down hospitals and airports “, points out the manager, who adds:” I was senior vice president of the product management division of Salesforce in San Francisco and then country leader of same company for Italy. But my first work experience in the US was as a university researcher and visiting professor “.
During his PhD in electronic computer engineering Bergamo met Professor Leonard Kleinrock in Bologna: “He had a research project that was on the same topic as my doctoral thesis and he invited me to work with him. He told me: ‘There is little money , but if you want to come, we have a fixed-term contract. ‘I grabbed that opportunity, it was the first time I was going abroad, I had not yet taken a plane in my life and flew to Los Angeles “. Having made the decision to go to California, Paolo Bergamo did not think he would stay long in the United States: “I arrived on November 16, I left Italy with a wool sweater but in Los Angeles it was 27 degrees”, he tells us, underlining who at first saw it more as an important experience to put on the CV. “But then, after 15 days, I felt at home, despite the initial linguistic difficulties: even though I spoke English and understood the most technical vocabulary, my knowledge of the language was not at an advanced level”, he continues.
After a few years of work and research in the United States, the phone rings signaling a new opportunity: the Apple she had called him to collaborate on a project. “In 2007 there was the launch of the iPhone, at the beginning the apps were all developed by the Cupertino company. Later the company decided to open the development kit. Steve Jobs had looked around to identify who had produced interesting applications. for the Blackberry and on the enterprise side he was impressed by my work. ” So after the call from the founder of Apple, Paolo Bergamo finds himself collaborating with Apple’s engineers. “When I received the call, I thought it was a joke”, he tells us, then explaining that “Steve Jobs had thought of doing the showcase of 5 applications: two were games, two consumer and one enterprise. He gave me the task of develop the latter. I worked with him periodically for a month, he came to check the progress of the applications as his popularity grew. “
The manager tells us that at that time he did not have the full perception of the importance of those moments, not only from a professional but also from a personal point of view. “Working in Salesforce with Marc Benioff has also led me to have experiences that I never thought were possible for a person born in Rovigo,” he tells us. Among the most important training and professional moments there is certainly the work experience in startup Sendia, “where we dealt with applications for the mobility of cloud services, then acquired by Salesforce, which then had only 700 workers”, he adds, recalling however that “the most important launch I did it with the Salesforce One application: in that ‘occasion I coordinated the work of 70 percent of the company’s engineering department for a year “. And there was no shortage of funny moments, like when artist Neil Young walked in the back door of Benioff’s house, sat on the sofa and sang ‘Old man’ for a few people: “He and Marc are friends”.
From his managerial experience in the United States he brings with him a lesson: the importance of the customer experience, “the simplification of the life of the customer you serve”, says Paolo Bergamo, adding that “in the end you can also have the best technology possible, but if then there is no interaction with the user and the ability to assist him with that technology, it’s a big problem “.
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