Pierpaolo is the Marketing and Sales Director in the company and his experience in Cedat85 began eleven years ago. “When I started what I call my ‘adventure’ in Cedat85”, says Pierpaolo, “the market was not ready for new technologies. We proposed extremely innovative technological solutions and applications for the time. This is why I speak of ‘adventure’, because it was a really important challenge. We crunched meetings and presentations in more or less major contexts, and I will admit that for the first three years of our work we often found ourselves overloaded. When we proposed our applications and demonstrated how they work, people were often baffled. Today the world has changed and the potential customers we meet are more used to imagining the inclusion of technological solutions within the most varied contexts”.
He is 100% Apulian and has a background in marketing and sales: “I don’t think it is possible to deal with marketing if you don’t know perfectly how the market or the product itself work. But the only way to get to know both the market and the product well is to get familiar with them. Theory is not enough, you need to get your hands dirty! I wrote a thesis in statistics and I like everything that can be measured, but my classical training means that I am unable to be satisfied merely with numbers and that I always maintain an open and problematic approach to what I manage “.
He tells us about his work: “I follow projects for very different entities. For example, for small city councils we design solutions to have multimedia council rooms, so I follow projects to renovate the council halls to make them support multimedia. With other clients, on the other hand, I work on the ‘customer satisfaction’ of voice interactions, therefore telephone interactions, between a public body and a user. In reality, jokingly, I like to say that in Cedat85 I am the doorman, I am the one who opens the door and welcomes the customer. I intercept an experience, a possible encounter “.
In the field of technology in which Pierpaolo moves, everything is in constant evolution and this fills the idea of the “future” with infinite possibilities: “In these eleven years everything has changed. When I joined Cedat85 the applications were in an embryonic state, while today the evolution that has taken place leads us to think that the future may still hold unthinkable surprises. This especially with respect to applications related to the universe of voice recognition. I am thinking, for example, of home automation, but I am thinking of truly secure home automation, and therefore not hackable. In Cedat85 we have engineered our technologies into “stand-alone” devices and this makes me believe that we could develop technologies in the field of home automation that do not go to the cloud, and therefore cannot be violated. Another field that will open up is that related to the interaction with humanoids that could support, for example, the activities in a store. In these cases it is essential that these ‘robots’ are able to understand the spontaneous speech of users to manage their requests “.
His passion is tangible: “I do a job that I really like and I am passionate about, despite the fact that more than ten years have passed. I feel on the frontier, always ready to advance a little towards the conquest of new technologies and discoveries. Everything changes very quickly: scenarios, possibilities, clients… Getting bored is really impossible. It satisfies me a lot when I manage to transfer concepts that were not even thought feasible to the person I’m talking with, for example when talking about technologies that are so mature that they can replace the human brain. This is the most interesting part of what I do”.
The relationship of trust and closeness that Pierpaolo has with his customers is unique. He tells us: “The period of ‘metabolisation’ of our technological proposals by our prospects is not very fast, on the contrary, it generally takes some time. On August 16th, my third day of vacation, I was called by the Mayor of a small town to whom for five years I had been proposing our solutions with a certain cadence. The mayor asked me to meet the next day. I was about 400 km away but I went there. I work with a view to assure continuity and backbone to our growth. We come from the experience of the field, in the sense that we never abandon any possibility of presiding over the market even in the smallest entity. So it’s not like saying that if it’s a small entity it has to wait. For us, all customers deserve respect, time, and care “.
The human relationship, according to Pierpaolo, comes first: “I spend a lot of my time on the train, sometimes on a plane, often in my car! I travel more than sixty thousand km a year but I do it because digital relationships cannot replace personal ones. Our proposals, to be truly understood, need to be told in person and this is true both in relation with clients and with colleagues. Today we are a cohesive group and this is possible because the company’s management had a vision. A vision that they were able to convey to all of us, to the team. The vision then began to take shape, to become a reality, it grew and transformed itself, it dared more and more. This allows us all to row in the same direction with spontaneity and the ability to always find the time not to leave work behind. We are a team, there is no single result but always the work of a group. What makes us truly unique is that we are born from the bottom up, we are not a compartmented and segmented multinational company. Here it is the soul of the group that carries the result forward and allows us to leave from San Vito dei Normanni to arrive in Brussels “.