Elena Nencini
Andrea Farina began his adventure as an entrepreneur in 1996 thanks to a difference of opinion on the future of IT with his boss at the time. Today he is president and CEO of Itway which closes with a turnover growing by 5% to 49 million euros but with the net result still in negative territory. For 2024 the Ravenna-based group indicates consolidated revenues of 55 million, today the company also has offices in Greece, Turkey and the USA.
Farina, you closed the balance sheet a few days ago, how did 2023 go?
«We are moderately satisfied, the maximum would have been if we had wanted to carry out a prudential operation of devaluation of a loan that had been on the balance sheet for a long time, but we do not despair of being able to recover it: it is a dispute that we have underway with the Ministry of the Interior for a supply made in Libya about fifteen years ago. It is ‘only’ about one million and 300 thousand euros. Without that we would have had a very satisfying outcome.”
2023 was particularly hard for companies in our area due to the flood. How did it go for you?
«Our headquarters was not spared given that it is in Fornace Zarattini, we had extensive damage, around 600 thousand euros. We still have the headquarters in a bit of a state of disrepair, but we thought that we need to derive an opportunity from a crisis and therefore we decided to renovate it. Luckily when we were evacuated people brought their computers with them and were able to work from home in smart working. The other offices, in Italy and abroad, have always worked: there has not been a real stop”.
How did the idea for Itway come about 28 years ago?
«I was the general director of a Romagna company, Esa Software in Rimini, fortunately my vision of how information technology would evolve was not aligned with the entrepreneur. So I took courage with all my hands, I had a two-year-old son and leaving a secure job as a company manager was a big leap. I started from scratch with a nice industrial project.
The experience and the degree in economics helped me write a good business plan where I involved investors, which wasn’t so trivial about thirty years ago. I created a sort of public company with a capital limit that each investor could put in: a figure studied by me which corresponded to how much money I could put into it. I thus brought together a dozen investors for a share capital of around 200 million lire.
I had met James Clark, the founder of Netscape, at the end of 1995 in California. It was an enlightening meeting. There I understood that something important was happening and that it was time to be there. I would say that 28 years later we are still here and growing.”
Are cyber security, big data, artificial intelligence (AI) the themes of the future?
«Yes, when we started investing in Ai in 2018 with an innovative product, Icoy Mover, an acronym that indicates “I take care of you” aimed at the worker. It is aimed at cyber safety, the market that concerns workplace safety, contains 10 patents and is based on the latest generation AI which is classified as deep learning. It is the current state of Ai’s technological development, which demonstrates how it can be used ethically to save human lives: we have customers in the metallurgical and heavy industry sectors where the risk for workers of being crushed by suspended loads is very high. Icoy is a sort of anti-collision device that recognizes the human figure if it comes within the operating range of the operating machine and triggers alarms, so that the position of that person can be changed.
Let’s add the cloud – where this information can end up – to big data, AI and cyber security, these are the future prospects for the evolution of information technology in the next ten years.”
How many employees do you have?
«We are more than 180, around fifty are in the Romagna area. Our offices are in Greece, Türkiye and operationally in the United States, Missouri and Kansas City. The United States is a very important country where we have excellent customers such as Harvard University and Princeton University who use our solutions. We are also present with 6 people in the Arab Emirates.”
There is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence, what do you think are the pros and cons?
«The way AI is structured and developed will require an ethical approach in its use as the power is so high and will always be so: it is possible to make real falsifications of reality, deep fakes, omit or add public figures to a video, make them say things they have never said. We need to put a stop to it. While if we use Ai for improvement uses, as with Icoy, it is an example of Ai saving lives. Europe is further ahead on these issues than the USA, in particular Italy, where the AI ethics committee is moving forward. I hope that these do not slow down development but must put in place certain and verifiable rules. The legislator must remember the importance of involving experts like us who can give a big hand.”
: «Meeting Clark from Netscape changed me. The future is in AI”){kind=link}