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Fabio Violante
Computer engineer with a passion for hardware and successful manager Fabio Violante is one of the most famous alumni of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, at least in the Italian and international tech-community, where he’s best known for his role as CEO of Arduino, the open-source platform for rapid prototyping used every day by millions of designers, planners and companies to quickly and easily build intelligent objects and digital devices.
Fabio's brilliant career started at the Politecnico di Milano, where, with some colleagues and teachers, he co-founded a start-up that was able to grasp the potential of the newborn internet network and was globally appreciated for its consulting services and its activities in the field of software engineering. Then came the acquisition by a large American company, in which for years he held a role of great responsibility, and finally he got to Arduino, where as CEO he’s working on projects that aim to make the package of solutions offered by the company even more versatile and complete, by looking to the future of connected objects and the Internet of Things.
Fabio, what’s the academic and professional path that led you to where you are today?
After getting a degree in Computer Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, I worked for a year in Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, and then I got back to the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering as a PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof. Fabio Schreiber. My research activity concerned primarily human-computer interaction for safety-critical systems and, secondarily, peer-to-peer systems and the statistical characterization of the performance of internet systems. With the help of Prof. Giuseppe Serazzi and Prof. Paolo Cremonesi, my research in the latter area gave birth to Neptuny, a start-up that measured the performance of websites.
Leaving aside the technical aspects, the idea behind Neptuny was to give companies a perception of the quality of the service they offered through external monitoring. At the time – and I am talking about the early 2000s - it was a pioneering idea. The only way to access the internet were modems and we had a modem infrastructure at our disposal that allowed us to measure the performance of websites and the quality of the providers. Neptuny was born from this somewhat naïve idea of an ante litteram SAS service. The company then evolved in two different directions: on the one hand we offered consulting services to our customers, who asked us to help them improve the performance of their websites, and on the other we worked on softwares based on statistics applied to technical data. That was when we developed Caplan, a platform for the capacity planning of large data centres ideal to meet the needs of our customers, mainly large companies that needed IT tools capable of managing huge amounts of data.
The company had a great success right from the beginning. We started in telecommunications, we expanded to finance and, within a decade, we became a global business until 2010, when Neptuny was acquired by BMC Software, an American corporation specialized in monitoring complex IT infrastructures. After the acquisition, the company was divided in two: the part that dealt with consulting gave birth to Moviri, a company still closely linked to the Politecnico that works on artificial intelligence and recommendation systems, while the part that dealt with software development, of which I was also a part, merged into BMC. Shortly after joining BMC, I was appointed Chief Technology Officer of one of the company’s four global business units, a position I held until 2015, when I decided to go back to an old love of mine: Arduino.
How did you meet Arduino?
My relationship with Arduino dates back to my PhD. I happened to visit a design school where they asked me if I was willing to teach young designers some basic elements of electronic engineering. I said no because I mainly dealt with software engineering but I recommended my friend Massimo Banzi, who soon got the job and founded Arduino right in that school. In the following years we parted ways until our paths crossed again when in 2015 I joined the company, of which I became CEO within two years.
Today Arduino is a much larger company than when I started managing it, both in terms of business volume and complexity. It is a real multinational corporation with a headquarter in Switzerland that deals with Finance & Marketing, an Italian branch that deals with Research & Development and a branch in Malmö, Sweden, that deals with education, that is specific products for schools and universities. In addition to these, there is also a US-branch that deals with the marketing of products designed for the American and global markets.
What does Arduino do?
Arduino was born as an easy-to-use prototyping tool with the particularity of being open-source hardware- and software-wise. Essentially, it is a hardware board that uses a C ++ “dialect” and can be safely used by people with no specific knowledges in electronics. It’s a platform that allows designers to design and build intelligent objects. Thanks to a very simple language and development environment, creatives can set up very interesting interactions, solving practical problems and at the same time learning the basics of electronics.
Originally meant for designers, thanks to word-of-mouth and a successful communication strategy, Arduino quickly spread to universities, where teachers have adopted it as a platform for teaching entire physical computing courses. From there, the whole world of hobby was contaminated. This gave birth to a galaxy of makers and digital artisans who began to apply the same techniques to solve everyday problems, from irrigating plants to building robots, creating new professions from scratch.
Think of drones: the first drones developed in the non-military field were based on Arduino platforms. Something similar happened with 3D printers: many young people began to build 3D printers with an Arduino “brain”, making a technology that until a few years earlier was bound by very complex patents, owned by a small number of corporations, much more accessible. The result was a real movement which today counts several million people. Our website has approximately 40 million unique users every year, which means that the open-source development environment we created is downloaded 40 million times a year. These are retail numbers, despite the fact that we’re talking about a product that needs to be programmed. Arduino is the company behind this movement made up of physical objects, a development environment and this community that uses our platforms to exchange ideas, solve problems, build new sensors, new applications…
Today we are active in three markets: to the “historical” makers market (hobby and do-it-yourself) we have added, in chronological order, the education market – where we have developed a curricular offer for teachers interested in teaching programming and hardware classes – and the professional market, meant for companies that use Arduino as a prototyping tool. We try to support these companies not only in the prototyping phase but also by providing them with easy-to-use tools to create IoT, AI and machine learning applications, and to retrofit existing plants. Here too, our goal is to foster creativity by making technology easier to use.
What are you working on right now? And what are your plans for the future?
Arduino is currently trying above all to develop solutions that meet the needs of the professional market. Given that the technology needed to create intelligent objects is very complex, we decided to simplify it, providing companies with both “basic bricks” that serve as a starting point for developing other technologies and “turnkey solutions” that allow, to make only an example, small automations at the product level.
The other big project we are working on is to integrate our hardware and core-products with a cloud platform that we launched a couple of years ago and which already has tens of thousands of users, in order to make smart devices more and more connected. I am referring, for example, to the ability to remotely control devices via a mobile app or to create cloud training for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Basically, we are offering the market a complete package of solutions, ranging from the basic elements that allow you to build intelligent objects up to the ability to program them and interact with them through a very advanced cloud infrastructure.
What do you like most about your job?
For someone who comes from software engineering – where there’s the chance of continuously improving products through intangible updates that don’t involve problems related to production, distribution or logistics – the most fascinating aspect is perhaps that of having learned what it means to build material objects, with all the complexities, problems and limitations that this materiality entails.
Another thing that makes me proud of my work is the impact that a company like Arduino has on society. Many young people decide to approach STEM disciplines because, thanks to Arduino, they discover that they are able to realize projects that previously seemed impossible. Arduino stimulates people to “turn on their brains”, to free their creativity, to become active protagonists of technological innovation by transforming their ideas into reality, even if only in prototype form. This experience pushes many boys and girls – creative, sensitive to the environment, to recycling and reuse – to take the path of engineering or other technological disciplines because it shows them that all this is possible. It is quite a unique aspect of my work, and one of the main reasons why I took this job.
From this point of view, Arduino projects related to the world of education are also very important...
Absolutely! Arduino was already being used spontaneously by some teachers but to increase the number of teachers who could transmit this passion to their students, we decided to join forces and help them solve their difficulties. Putting the greatest number of teachers in a position to approach the teaching of STEM subjects with confidence is very important for us and that’s why we have dedicated specific investments to this issue.
Coming to your experience as a student and PhD candidate at the Politecnico di Milano, how important was it for you, humanly and professionally, to attend a university like the Politecnico? Among the things you learned, was there anything that was particularly useful to you when it came to taking your first steps into your career?
First of all, I would distinguish the period of the degree from that of the PhD. The graduation period was very formative due to the wide-ranging teaching offer of the Politecnico, where purely quantitative teachings such as engineering, physics and mathematics were accompanied by extremely interesting courses in economics, statistics and applied mathematics which later – when I became the CEO of my first company will I was still a PhD student – they have come in very handy. Although I am a computer engineer, I graduated with a thesis in Bioengineering and, as head of the Medical Informatics laboratory directed by Prof. Francesco Pinciroli, I was able to access the internet “in advance”. We are talking about the mid-90s, a time when the internet as we know it today was still unimaginable. During that time, I had the opportunity to build many relationships, to work with large amounts of data and to experiment without constraints or limitations. This freedom was very important and allowed me to have access to everything that was available regarding software development.
The PhD was a particular experience because it left a lot of space for individual initiatives and a lot depended on how the working group was structured. In my case, it was a not-so-structured group that gave me the freedom to manage my research activity quite independently. It’s an experience that made me grow a lot from a professional point of view because it taught me how to manage time and priorities. And if, on the one hand, it made me understand that I was not cut out for an academic career, on the other, the PhD gave me the opportunity to get in touch with many people and with many companies, who often visited the laboratories of the Politecnico searching for solutions for particularly complex problems.
Is there a funny anecdote dating back to your “polytechnic years” that you would like to tell?
The funniest episode happened to me at the time I was writing my thesis. As an “off-site student”, in addition to attending courses and studying for my exams, I also worked a few jobs to pay the rent in Milan. In particular, at that time I was a laboratory technician for Bocconi University and I also worked as a computer technician for Hewlett-Packard. Under the gun, a few days before the deadline, to force myself to finish writing the thesis I asked the building manager to lock me in the laboratory for the whole weekend, and to let me sleep there for two nights. It was a very challenging experience but, in the end, I managed to deliver the thesis on time!
Finally, what advice would you give to a Computer Engineering student aspiring to work in your industry?
The advice for computer engineers is to look at the hardware with different eyes. Often those who deal with software think that the hardware is something very complicated, untouchable, difficult... But today it’s essential to understand computers architecture because programming these devices is becoming more and more complex for reasons that are closely related to the hardware structure and that many programmers are not used to considering, such as power consumption or battery life. Knowing how the devices on which programs run are made, understanding their complexity and being aware of the fact that this complexity can be mastered: this is very important for a computer engineer.
The second piece of advice is not to neglect quantitative subjects. Although today the trend is to work with materials that have already been developed by someone else, every now and then it is necessary to open the hood of the car, get your hands on the engine and understand how it works. And the tool to do this continues to be mathematics: the mathematics of neural networks but also statistics. Having a solid background in these disciplines can also make a difference in the job market because not many people are able to deal with data and machine learning. These skills will be very important in the future, when many of the things we interact with in daily life will become smart objects.
In short, experimenting and gaining experience in the field are very important things. Computer engineers tend to look at problems in an abstract way but to be successful in an industry like this you need to get your hands dirty, try to understand the needs of users and customers, learn to listen to the world and the people around us. For this reason, it is also necessary not to neglect interaction design, that is, the ability to design well-conceived objects from the point of view of human-computer interaction. A certain sensitivity towards these issues often makes the difference between a successful project and one that doesn’t work.
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