Roberto Galimberti, Vice President of Etnoteam S.p.A.

I.NET certainly represents an interesting case not only because of the technical innovations it brought in the Italian Internet scenario, but also from a management point of view, considering how we have been able to drive the company evolution so far. I.NET was established by the initiative of two university spin-offs and Etnoteam in 1994, it was listed on the Milan Stock Exchange in 2000 and merged with British Telecom Italia in 2008. All these steps were possible thanks to a great availability and flexibility on the management side.

The following picture is the synthesis of I.NET strategic evolution:

I.NET was established as an Internet Service Provider in 1994, when Internet was almost only a university matter. Let’s not forget that at the time the Web didn’t exist yet. We had to invent everything: what to sell, to whom, at what price, how to find out competitors and differentiate from the incoming great operators, how to create a trade association with the famous key players of the time (Agorà, Video online, MC-Link, IT-Net, etc.), in order to set up rules for the market evolution.

We were supported by two great assets:

• The know-how developed by the two spin-offs (Antropos and Sida) through research years in such a marvellous forge of ideas and young talents as Gianni Degli Antoni’s school at the Università Statale di Milano;
• Etnoteam’s management and money, necessary to boost a capital intensive initiative.

We immediately realized that we had to keep on inventing new solutions to differentiate from the others by always being “at the cutting edge”: closer to customers, more advanced than competitors.

As a result, we created the hosting, the network management, the security, the Web Farm, the Disaster Recovery: in a word, what we called NASP = Network Application Service Provider.

In 1999 BT, buying the relative majority of the company’s shares, considerably reinforced its structure and was very helpful as for the financial management and international relationships. It was the “new economy” era. Anyway, I.NET always refused to use that term and preferred to belong to the modest but undoubtedly realer and concrete “net-economy”. Also the fact of becoming a listed company in April 2000, though exploiting the crazy prices of the time, was a step of an industrial development and not a financial matter.

At this point the company had grown up: it had a strong management and a well-defined industrial development plan, which can be summarized through our saying “From Bricks to Brain”. This means that it changed from a capital intensive to a people intensive company, able to provide its customers with continuous services, based on infrastructures consisting of networks and WEB Farms (that others still call Data Centres) and on a group of highly specialized technicians able to solve the ICT problems that non-specialists have to face every day.

Today our company provides infrastructures and ICT services (Application management) and is ready to be the basis for the development of new and only recently defined services, such as IPTV and CDN (Content Distribution NetWork).