Frederico Protto: Driving Digital Transformation through Cutting-Edge Communication Network

The emergence of digitalization, the advent of 5G, and the development of Industry 4.0 with the progress in Artificial Intelligence and Cloud are revolutionizing the global market across all major businesses and infrastructure. The execution of complex projects based on sophisticated technology is required to promote and deliver the digital revolution successfully. Retelit has endeavored to satisfy the market connectivity demand by drawing up a plan for growth and the foundation of its valuable assets over the last five years. Retelit has closed two important M&A projects to satisfy the ever-growing demand from national and international enterprises. It has invested in skills and competencies to cover all the digitalization and ICT value chain such as infrastructure, data, network, and applications. The target market share requires tailor-made digital projects specially post-COVID pandemic.

The company is focused on improving internally managed platforms such as a partnership with Huawei, which developed a Multi-cloud platform to manage Hybrid Cloud solutions on an end-to-end basis. It also includes the Cloud services at its Data Centers that are the traditional outsourcing of infrastructure and the Public Cloud that is provided by suppliers like AWS and Microsoft Azure. These two Clouds provide a diverse range of IT services models with maximum flexibility. It is based on Openstack software that allows customers of Retelit to benefit from an open, flexible, scalable, and vendor lock-in-free environment. That being said, Retelit shows a strong focus on its cloud service offering. The CEO of the company, Frederico Protto has an aim to develop further with an expectation of more convergence between connectivity and cloud solutions. This will integrate new services over the IP layer.

Retelit has also created a voice platform to manage the needs and wants of customers post-pandemic. The staff can respond with full flexibility to the communication needs of any type of business such as multi-office enterprises and ensure a dedicated phone network and excellent service quality. The voice service is based on Voice over IP (VoIP) that allows calls through Internet while ensuring standard functionality. It also provides multiple benefits of United Communication including Direct Routing for Microsoft teams, IVR, and Stand-alone Managed Services.

New disruptive technologies create a massive impact on markets such as streaming has disrupted music, TV, and multiple film industries, social media has disrupted the media sector, and so on. The company tends to find new business and markets with the advent of new technologies. The emergence of 5G network has created a plethora of new possibilities such as network slicing, ultra-low latency, and remote-controlled vehicles. Artificial Intelligence is enhancing efficiency and effectiveness in the current business logic by speeding up the innovation process and eliminating any obstacle. These new technologies also drive new consumer buying behavior that represents a potential market segment.

Affordable technologies boost research and accelerate innovation processes not only for multinational corporations but also for several enterprises, irrespective of company size. It allows the companies to transform the ideas and concepts into viable products and services.

There were some foundational challenges faced by the company at the initial stage to achieve such outperformed milestones in these recent years. Frederico observed that the company was incurring massive losses during his joining period in 2014. The shareholders entrusted him with the task of bringing the business back on track. He decided to change its course to gain credibility in the financial market with this fundamental step. It was a tough time to make people understand the life of this company. Yet together, they prepared a very challenging business plan that has helped the company to gain respect and also outperform in the following years.

But, apart from being face-to-face with challenges, Retelit is claimed as a "little big player" in the current scenario. The product portfolio of the company is as wide as big competitors in the market. It is a boutique for large customers who prefer to reduce the number of suppliers by creating a partnership with which they can undertake the path to their success. Retelit accompanies the customers from the initial journey, the first encounter to further implementations and renovations. The company can foresee a kind of trivialization of the connectivity services in the next decade. Retelit will be increasingly capable of providing digital solutions running on its own infrastructure. The digital solution is specifically for customers who will opt for full package service. The brand positioning in the wholesale market will strengthen itself due to the never-ending growth of bandwidth demand across the world.

Frederico was appointed as CEO of Retelit in 2015 for his managerial skills developed over 25 years of experience in the TLC sector. He has been successfully steering the company into a growth trajectory with his two principles of leadership— trust and credibility. He was born in Milan in 1967 and a Bocconi MBA graduate with a Master's in IT. He has worked for T-Systems International GmbH (Deutsche Telekom Group) where he held multiple positions. He started his journey in 2002 in the B2B segment and he was recognized as the COO and the Head of the International Telecommunications Services in 2010 across 25 countries. He also held the Executive positions as Service Delivery Director for Southern Europe and Access Network Director for the whole EMEA region at Verizon Business as well as the Head of Technical Service for the release of services for the business market at Telecom Italia.

Frederico studied Electronic Engineering with enormous satisfaction but soon he realized that being "just" an engineer was not sufficient for him He kick-started his career in Telecom Italia where he used to manage teams of people in call centers. Frederico considers that period to be an important formative period as it allowed him to successfully deal with industrial and trade union predicaments and complex dynamics. Though he was enjoying the work at Telecom Italia, it was still insufficient for him as he wanted international exposure. Thus, Frederico shortly engaged with MCI Worldcom before commencing a 13 year-long experience with Deutsche Telecom. It has allowed him to grow from a managerial point of view with an orientation to control and management as well as understood the importance of defining a strategy. The long term planning is impracticable but any company is dead without a defined strategy. The main challenge for a business leader is to define a 5-year strategy in a context that changes every six months. The leader should have a clear vision and goals in a dynamic environment.

Frederico has always set précised and realistic goals by using his managerial skills to both capitalize on trends and to respond to fast-pacing developments in the fields of technology and infrastructure. That being said, Retelit has gradually transformed its identity to achieve major goals such as the completion of an international subsea cable project known as AAE-1, important M&A projects, and expanded the clients base such as operators, enterprises as well as governments. The leadership in Retelit has become more robust by carrying out ambitious expansion plans with a revised infrastructure network. The KPI improved and achieved a historical milestone when the company earned an operating profit (EBIT) amounting to Euro 2.2 million in 2016. This was the first-ever feather in the cap of the Group. It has grown faster than the industry has grown and accordingly, the market share has been expanding. These achievements have been reflected in the positive numbers in the recent financial statements.