Giuseppe is our first employee for our new subsidiary in the USA. He is busy building Hornetsecurity Inc. and establishing it in the Pittsburgh region and beyond.

 

Hi Giuseppe, you are officially our first employee in our U.S. office. Can you tell me a little bit about your work at Hornetsecurity?

  No problem. Hornetsecurity has given me a unique opportunity to be a part of their US expansion.  Presently, I’m tasked with building relationships and helping to find partners who will help us grow. It’s an incredible feeling to be given the confidence to come onboard and guide how our process will be developed here in the Pittsburgh office. It certainly has been a learning experience for me as I have been able to participate not only in sales strategy, but I’ve also had the pleasure to work with the Marketing and PR teams to get the business up and running. It has been very busy, but I have enjoyed all aspects of the experience. I’m confident that the team we have in Germany and the team we are assembling here in Pittsburgh are poised for the challenges involved in growing.
 

Would you mind giving us some insight into your daily routine?

  Not at all! I have a pretty simple daily routine and it all starts with communication. Typically, I read over my emails first thing in the morning before I leave for the office here in Bakery Square. My work commute through the neighborhood takes me less than 10 minutes. Once I arrive at the office I start off by responding to emails and contacting my colleagues in Germany. I want to make sure that we have some time to collaborate on various projects, since we have a time difference of 6 hours. After I finish with conference calls and anything that needs my urgent attention I pick up the phone and start calling prospective leads here in Pittsburgh. I follow up with clients that have reached out and update our CRM software. I try to think of new ways to improve my sales process and experiment with incremental changes. I also think about what the office needs are as we continue to grow and I envision how we can make the office functional for the team – that’s an exciting part about being here at the beginning.
 

You have already been to the offices in Germany. How were your impressions of Germany, the offices and your new colleagues?

  I had been to Europe in the past and even spent some time teaching English in Italy years ago, but I had never been to Germany before this trip. It truly is a remarkable country full of warm and wonderful people. I did not know much German other than a few key phrases that I picked up, but I found no shortage of strangers who were willing to help me find my hotel or point me in the right direction at a train station.   I really had no idea what to expect at the Hornetsecurity offices. I had met the CEO, Oliver Dehning, here in Pittsburgh, but I didn’t know what the full picture of the office was going to be like. As the first US employee traveling overseas for training I was just expecting a sterile office building. Thankfully, I was very mistaken about that. When I arrived in Hanover I was quickly impressed. The offices were warm and vibrant and bursting with talent. I was greeted by smiling faces who were happy to see me and would eventually become my friends. It seemed that every individual in a role at Hornetsecurity had been handpicked and had something special to offer the team. They all fit into a very fun culture of tech, and genuinely loved their jobs. Their enthusiasm was infectious.   After my training in Hanover, I was sent to meet the sales team in Berlin and I was curious if this other office could live up to the hype that Hanover had created in my mind, and once again I could not have asked to be introduced to a better group of people. The team was talented and knew how to have fun while still being productive. They spend a lot of time smiling and laughing and made me feel at home. The office itself was in the center of Berlin and gave me a chance to get a feel for the culture and take in the sights. In addition to learning from a team with top talent, I was fortunate to be introduced to what is now one of my new favorite cities.  

Hornetsecurity is a German provider of cloud security services. Have you worked before in this industry or is everything completely new to you?

  I have worked with Inside Sales teams for several Fortune 500 companies and had experience with Enterprise sales. One of these companies was a telecommunications industry leader that gave me an opportunity to learn a great deal about technology. However, this is my initiation into the world of cloud based security services and Hornetsecurity is working with the most advanced technologies that I have had the opportunity to encounter in my professional life.  

What is your experience with the Hornetsecurity solutions so far?

  I’ve been extremely impressed by how well Hornetsecurity solutions have been designed. There has been careful attention to detail to make sure that the products are intuitive and offer a fantastic user experience. The extra effort taken to ensure that the products are constantly being updated by our system engineers to make certain that network administrators have peace of mind is a remarkable thing to offer our clients.  

The American IT market is huge. Do you think Hornetsecurity can take advantage of this and why?

  Absolutely. The IT market is enormous and that makes sense when you think about the evolution of technology throughout time. In a globalized world, technology is involved in the background of all aspects of our lives. We depend on technology to source our morning news, to learn about the weather, and even to figure out what’s for dinner.   It makes sense that more and more IT infrastructure is needed as the amounts of data being stored and transferred continue to grow exponentially. However, as these technologies continue to be used there will be opportunists who seek to exploit vulnerabilities in current IT systems and with outdated technology infrastructure that is still being used. Let’s think of the example like an appliance based email gateway. A lot of these hardware based components are quickly becoming relics. They are consuming a lot of energy and are costly to maintain. As a result, these systems are not typically updated as much as would be ideally necessary.   Technology is changing more rapidly than ever and the reality is that cloud based computing is here to stay. We need stay ahead of the curve and be flexible enough to change with the industry to meet the changing needs of the world. Hornetsecurity makes a point of being highly flexible and adapting to changing malware that is constantly being produced and because there is no physical hardware in front of a client’s email server we can effectively keep malware out of company’s networks where it belongs.