Interview with Alessandro Di Salvo: how the NOC powers Italtel Spain’s growth strategy

From Ciudad Real to the Future: the NOC leading Italtel Spain’s journey of growth and innovation

What role does the NOC play in Italtel Span’s broader strategy for contributing to growth in the country?

Italtel NOC was established in Spain many years ago and today employs about 100 people, serving 1,020 enterprise customers in more than 170 countries, providing 24/7 operations of their networks.

Managed Services represent a bit more than 30% of our business in Spain, both in terms of revenues and margin. Therefore, they are an important pillar of our company’s strategy, along with a pivotal part of our mission to improve our customers’ operational efficiency and guarantee their great network availability.

The telco market in Spain witnessed the consolidation of Network Operators like MasMovil and Orange, as well as the sale of Vodafone Spain to Zegona Communications.

Such M&A activities bring an increasing need for internal operational efficiency, and the outsourcing of legacy network technologies can be the answer to achieving immediate benefits. This might lead to an increasing demand for managed services.

Therefore, Italtel Digital Operations Center (NOC), with more than 7 years of experience, optimized and automated processes, can be one of the growth engines for Italtel in the coming years.

Where are you directing investments to ensure the NOC evolves in line with market demands?

I see an immediate need to keep extending the competencies around cloud platforms, especially the cloud-native ones.

I believe all software workloads are migrating further towards containerized environments, and it is pivotal to acquire the capability to master our services around those platforms.

Furthermore, considering the increasing importance of cybersecurity for companies of any size, and the investment required to build an in-house SOC (both in terms of money and competence), Italtel’s offer of SOCaaS can provide a trusted and sustainable way for the SME market to ensure quick and reliable security for their IT/Telco infrastructure.

This is also where I see Italtel developing further service capabilities to respond to market evolution.

Italtel has been working for a few years with several partners and INCIBE to develop an advanced software capable of filtering more than 90% of false threats, as we have recently presented together with our partner Apolo Cybersecurity at the AOTEC expo in Madrid.

Therefore, we believe we have a competitive advantage to offer such services to the Spanish market.

What’s your long-term vision for how the NOC can become a differentiator for Italtel in Spain?

Our Digital Operations Center is in Ciudad Real, a city in central Spain, just an hour by train from Madrid, hosting one of the Spanish universities and educating several ITC engineers every year.

My long-term vision for Italtel is expanding our Digital Operations Center (NOC) in Ciudad Real to:

• serve the Public Administration during their digital transformation journey,

• collaborate with the local university to innovate, acquire new competences, and offer new job opportunities.

By creating a successful cooperation with the local public administration and institutions, our Digital Operations Center can contribute to generating new business opportunities and become one of our future differentiators in Spain.