Alessio Murroni is now Vice President of Sales for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region for Cambium Networks. A highly experienced sales executive in both the service provider and enterprise sectors, Murroni boasts a long series of proven successes. In nearly 20 years of B2B sales experience, he has built long-term relationships and successful partnerships that have generated significant growth in several European verticals. To understand the ICT European market, InnovationOpenLab asked a couple of questions to Alessio, to exploit its wide range expertise of the European market.

Cambium Networks offers wireless communications for businesses, communities and cities around the world. Millions of radios are installed to connect people, places and things with a unified wireless fabric that embraces different standards and frequencies of fixed wireless and Wi-Fi, all managed centrally via the cloud. Cambium Networks offers a multi-gigabit wireless solutions and an attractive value proposition over traditional fiber and alternative wireless solutions.

Alessio, congratulations on your new position. EMEA is a big region, what countries will you be more focused on?

After so many year of focus in Europe it’s very clear to me that the biggest upside is in Africa and Middle East where we have both regional carriers that are perfect targets for our Fixed Wireless Access solutions and where we have strong hospitality market that we have not yet successfully addressed.

Speaking about Western Europe (Spain, France, Germany) and the Cambium Networks market, what are the differences and similarities of approach with Italy?

Cambium is growing significantly on the enterprise networking business, we are gaining market share from competitive enterprise vendors, UK is the leading market followed by DACH (Germany plays a key role here) and then Italy and France. Traditionally in Italy and Spain we have a strong Wirless Internet Service Provider market and a very fragmented networking business, mainly made up of Small Medium Business. Cambium’s positioning fits very well from SMB to enterprise customers and in terms of vertical markets we are focused on Hospitality and Education where Manage Service Providers (MSPs) play an important role, specifically in UK.

What about differences and similarities between channel partners? What is our "ranking" in terms of capabilities?

It’s difficult to "rank" partners, I’d say that in Southern Europe they are less risk adverse compared to Northern Europe and this makes it more difficult to gain competitive accounts. Middle East and Africa is a completely different world compared to Europe, need to understand the culture and the way they do business, the financial part is also a key aspect to take into account, there are financial limitations that are specific to certain countries where there is limited to no access to credit and foreign currencies

We know that any vendor would protect the local channel business, but, thinking about big Italian system integrators that want to expand in Europe, do you think they are able to?

I think it’s really challenging to expand abroad, normally it happens when a large end user based in Italy has local branches abroad and wants to rely on a single system integrator for the whole IT, this is a turning point for the system integrator, either he is able to scale and keep the client by investing in resources and know how or the end user is likely to rely on very large multinational system integrators, which charge a premium price but can guarantee service level agreement and business continuity.

PNRR opportunities are open to all in the whole Europe (potentially an Italian system integrator can participate in a public call for funding in all Europe), do you think it would be an opportunity for our ecosystem?

Our extraordinary growth in the enterprise networking business is also due to European funding, aimed to support the digital transformation in different verticals like public administration, hospitality, education to name a few.