A few days ago we were invited by Aruba.it a Imola, at the legendary Autodromo Internazionale Enzo and Dino Ferrari, on the occasion of the Superbike World Championship, where Aruba.it runs (and wins) with theAruba Racing Team.
For the very few who don't know
Aruba is an IT company founded in 1994 in Florence. The services offered range from domain registration, to e-mail systems and connectivity up to dedicated servers, virtual private servers, certified e-mails… and the list obviously goes on.
In 2003 their first webfarm was inaugurated in Arezzo and in 2017 the Global Cloud Data Center in Ponte San Pietro (Bergamo), the group's third data center in Italy. Meanwhile, since 2015 Aruba is literally hit the track participating, in partnership with Ducati, Superbike Championship (SBK for friends).
Superbike?
Superbike is the main league for motorcycles derived from series production, or by motorcycles normally made for road circulation, contrary to the a MotoGP where instead you compete with prototypes.
Our experience
Over the course of Friday, in the apparent "stillness" of the free tests that teams and riders use to fine-tune the bikes in anticipation of the two races of the weekend, we had the opportunity to chat with Stefano Cecconi, CEO of the group or, better, as stated also by his outfit (jacket and tie replaced by the team colors), Team Principal of the stable.
We were welcomed into the sala briefing of Hospitality Aruba. A long and interesting chat, in which we talked about motorsport, investments, strategy, energy e future. A conversation that we will try to report in its salient points.
Premise
For those who have never been to a circuit, a small introduction must be made, useful to better understand the context in which we were welcomed. Each racing circuit is equipped with a paddock, a huge area that, through the pits, connects technical trucks, spare parts, motorhomes and hospitality to the real track.
This area is populated by meccanici, pilots, (to become a sponsor), Journalists and naturally Tifosi. An immense and colorful village that, like a circus, is constantly assembled, disassembled and moved (13 Round in 5 continenti).
However, not all environments are accessible. L'Hospitality for example, it is a structure that the teams prepare to welcome the professionals (engineers, mechanics, pilots, etc ...) and guests by invitation. A place to rest, meet and eat the main meals, but to which not everyone has access.
To give you a measure: this is a restaurant capable of satisfying an average of 1000 meals a day throughout the race weekend. In Imola they were about 750 guests expected by the team Aruba and its partners.
The Hospitality consists of two large trucks side by side and from which, by spreading a sheet, a cover is created that protects from sun (Friday) and rain (Sunday).
The trucks then act as warehouses, operational offices and obviously meeting rooms. They are in effect the base-camp of these great teams.
The chat
It is in this charming ed exclusive context that Stefano Cecconi welcomed us and we immediately wanted to take advantage of his dual experience as CEO and Team Manager to ask him what can be the advantages, for companies and entrepreneurs, in facing the motorsport as a promotional platform.
“It is always difficult to give advice because it depends so much on the sector, the type of clientele and the target. For example, we made this reasoning: we needed mass visibility for some of our services because they were services that were aimed at a very wide audience, where it is more difficult to make targeted communication. The equivalent of the TV commercial: you make an advertisement and send it. Li is a pure brand, which we exhibit on motorcycles by counting on the minutes of television exposure. The reasoning to be done is: how much does traditional advertising cost? What can we hope to achieve by comparing the cost of sponsorship with brand exposure? Especially if we can't put any message or communicate something more specific.
An investment that worked, because it was the alternative after 5 years of football (with Torino) and it was quite equivalent for us. On the other hand, a very different thing, and it depends on the type of company, is whether you have a clientele that is not mass but high-end, like the one we are trying to reach today with Aruba Enterprise ".
Aruba Enterprise is a division of the group dedicated to companies and specialized in studying and offering targeted solutions and consultancy for interventions and digital transformations. Therefore, the main services include: the supply of IT infrastructures, the application of Cloud Technologies and the Dematerialization of processes. All activities that for customers, as we will see, can lead to substantial advantages both in management and economic terms.
“In the case of the single customer - he continues Cecconi - the approach changes completely, you have a direct relationship, a salesperson who follows it. You can invite and accompany him, making him live an experience. It is one thing to buy a ticket, inviting customers to third party events, another thing to invite them to something where you are more involved. The sponsor already has his role in the economy of a team, we have taken a further step, by managing the team we can show what we are doing firsthand. You take extra risks: if all goes well you make a good impression. If things go wrong you are a fool twice (laughs) because you spent and made a bad impression. But it is a risk that by choosing Ducati and choosing the riders well… making a bad impression was excluded. And if you don't win a bit, the boxes turn around ... let's see if this year we can fix this piece too. "
"Advice: certainly sponsorship in general, even before reaching motorsport, is not for everyone, because investments that are too small in my opinion are ends in themselves. Being essentially invisible doesn't bring much. If you do it and you do it well it can be, not the only one, but a very efficient method of branding too. It must then be accompanied with traditional communication. You need to have your entire campaign on traditional channels where you bring your message and then reinforce it by exposing the brand in an activity like this. For larger companies that can afford more substantial investments, and perhaps have a smaller, less massive clientele, we have seen that it worked a lot. It works even better than football: the 90 'of the game does not allow you to have any interaction with the customer. You invite him, he is a guest, you don't have to "piss him off" and five minutes before the end of the game he goes away so as not to find a mess. You can't do much there.
On a racing weekend there are moments between the rounds of evidence, Between qualifications, race, where to talk about a little business is there. It is not annoying or invasive, here we can do much more. When you manage to bring a customer on the circuit for the first time, everything is new. Experience a WOW effect. It's like going to a concert with your normal ticket or going backstage, it's a more exclusive experience. And this is appreciated in most cases.
In summary: if one can afford it, it is certainly an activity that does well, being careful to always calibrate the investment to what is visibility. "
Of course, we add, sponsorship solutions in motorsport are varied. The choices made by Aruba are extremely challenging; however, there are a myriad of other more accessible solutions and this even just by remaining within the scope SBK, not to mention the many other emerging competitions and categories.
Furthermore, in the specific case of Aruba, a further point of reflection has taken over: football had a limit, it stopped in Italy. When the company's business went international there was a need for something that was followed globally. Motorsport (like other sports) had this characteristic, with the plus of containing very much technology.
“Here we deal with technology anyway. There is an IT component in the team, you can show the practical application of some of your technologies. It is clear that in recent years there has been an explosion of electronics and its importance in motorcycle performance. The sensors have multiplied dramatically and indeed, precisely to limit this aspect, it is the regulation that at a certain point limits us in the quantity of channels that the control units can manage. This data must be processed, essentially in real time, albeit we are prohibited from having a wireless connection with the motorcycle. "
“We see the bike as an ethernet device. As soon as it arrives, what is connected to it is essentially a network cable. At that point, the acquisition is downloaded and the data must be quickly viewed and processed, in order to plan the changes to be made to all the settings and mappings in a very short time, and then reload them on the bike and put it back in the rider's hands.
There is also a small part of telecommunications. Everything that we download locally we process first on the circuit and then it is also sent to Ducati, in case further help is needed from “home”. This means having a server, storage and of course all the networking. All of this has to work because if something happens it wasn't "nice to have". Here if something does not work the performance is totally compromised. So there is some critical IT that needs to function properly and have certain performance and reliability. Which in the end looks a lot like our normal job. "
And in the meantime, in which direction is the company going?
“We were born and raised as a single sector, almost a single product, but we have been trying to diversify for some time. Now we do a fairly heterogeneous amount of things: from the health card to the cloud for the public administration. Or the Lay of the passports that we provide to the printer, a different job than many others we do. However, we see it as a natural step. The public administration spends a lot and our task is to propose solutions that allow you to spend less.
There is still a lot to do because if we look at the CAD application we are not at a good point. Even the minimum backup and disaster recovery equipment that everyone would be obliged to have does not have them. The market therefore has yet to explode. In fact, I think we will get to an even more local level. But not only from the customer's point of view, also infrastructural. If we really begin to concentrate future investments we will have more distributed Data Centers. This is also thanks to the 5G, which more than for connectivity, will definitely break the waters with respect to the amount of connected devices and the performance that they will require in terms of latency will not allow us to serve the whole country from Milan.
This is also demonstrated by our development plan: we had Arezzo, but from there we could not serve the whole market, we made an investment in the north, immediately. We were still opening a Bergamo who have announced the investment in Rome. And that won't be enough either. In 10 years, many more data centers will be needed. Today a Data Center under 10 Megawatts can hardly justify all the sub-infrastructures that serve to manage it. Therefore, by economizing on scale, it is possible to make volumes and save. The Data Center will become 4/5 times the average size of what they have now. We have already started talking about Megawatt with the individual customer. So much so that we are planning 90 Megawatt structures. But it is a dimension that at this moment becomes too critical. And not being able to make Data Centers too large, the solution is to distribute them. "
How to handle all of this? Especially the enormous consumption of a Data Center?
"Unfortunately, why shouldn't this be the case, theItaly can often be predicted by looking at what happens elsewhere, with a time delta we will see it happen also by us. London, Amsterdam, Paris are in crisis. Making other Data Centers in those cities is difficult. Once the problem was if the fiber got there, now one wonders if there is enough current.
A planning that must be done in terms of years, starting two or three years earlier than when you need it. On the Data Centers we are producers of energy from renewable sources and locally as much as possible. The PV it is the easiest, thanks to the roofs of the low and flat buildings, this we are already doing in Bergamo and Rome is designed in the same way. But in Bergamo we also have theidroelectric.
We are buying and investing in hydroelectric plants a renewable source around that area. Hoping for a regulatory change that has not yet taken place, to free up the market a little so as to allow self-consumption even of energy not produced on site. Now it is not allowed and there are so many system charges for transportation that it is worth buying where you need it. "
An apparently very Green philosophy ...
“In our sector, efficiency is one of the reasons for competition. It's too easy for us to do green things. "
“We work in Italy, but we live on planet earth. Italy is a country where, especially if you have children, you have to think about it: does what I do have an impact? When we start talking about big powers, you are a energy-intensive enterprise. A data center is capable of consuming like a steel mill and has an impact. There are many industrial applications that only have consumption peaks. We, on the other hand, are constant. A quick calculation could compare the residential consumption of the province of Bergamo to a single building of ours. A significant weight.
What you are doing has an impact, but you also realize theinefficiency of the electricity grid. If you go and see what is produced, whatever the form of production, 30/40% of what is produced is lost in transport, transformation and production. A dispersion that we do not have with our local production. So, if instead of transporting, I produce locally, it costs the same, but I have no dispersion. And even before thinking about the green message, this is an advantage for the company. And for energy-intensive companies it should be mandatory to look at forms of self-production or where not possible, at least there high efficiency cogeneration. If you start putting these things together and applying them to all industrial sectors, you make a huge difference, we can't force others, but we can at least do it for ourselves. And by the way it is a win win. It is ethically correct but moreover, with all these technologies to increase the energy efficiency of your Data Center, you have less waste, you tip it on the price, on the customer and you become more competitive from a commercial point of view. There is no NO in all of this.
The only drawback is that you have to make investments, also quite full-bodied. If you have to go into debt and take excessive risks, wait and do it as soon as possible. And here we come to the main obstacle: theregulatory uncertainty, which kills a lot of good intentions. The example is photovoltaics, with investment plans in 20 years, then revised on 30, are things that actually put in difficulty. And when you plan investments with horizons of 20/30 years, these things have an impact. An entrepreneur can make the choice only on an ethical level, but how does a manager do it? How do you justify such a risk before the board of directors? "
"The planet, of business, didn't give a damn before or after."
Tagsaruba Data Center Stefano Cecconi Superbike A chat with Stefano Cecconi, CEO of Aruba.it
