Jorge Pereyra (53) has been linked to Netgate since 2001 and took over the management when Álvaro Lamé, former director of the company and a reference in the IT sector, died unexpectedly. Until then, Pereyra participated in the board meetings and was in charge of Expand, a related company. After "assimilating the blow" that Lamé's death meant, he dedicated himself to continue "with his legacy".
He is a Systems Engineer, graduated from the University of the Republic, and did a master's degree in Administration at the ORT University. In addition to his academic training, he is known for his "street learning", which he acquired by working. Currently, in addition to being the CEO of Netgate and Expand, he advises companies from various fields in systems engineering.
Was it always clear to you where your vocation was going?
From a very early age I had a very strong orientation towards technology, but, above that, I had an orientation towards business, towards business development. In particular, what seduces me most about companies is the development strategy. How to enable them to meet the challenge of continuous change. Particularly in technology companies, where time is a tyrant.
You took over the management of Negate when Lamé passed away. Had there been any previous transitional period?
I worked with Álvaro in the management of Netgate. I did it more on the side, in board meetings. I was always very aware of the company and when Álvaro passed away, which was not expected, I had to take the reins. That was in January 2017. It was a bitter pill to swallow because beyond the 14 or 15 years of relationship as a partner, he was a guy that the market recognized a lot because he had a proactivity and a brutal entrepreneurship. When he left, although it was a very hard blow, we were able to assimilate it and continue with his legacy.
What is this legacy?
Innovation. The company has it practically in its veins, in its DNA. You always go to the roots and see where innovation is, and what you realize is that it is part of the people's processes, it is the ability to put together work teams. Innovation can be many things, but down to earth it is finding intelligent and efficient solutions to problems that people pose to you.
One of the company's current lines of action is artificial intelligence. How would you define this technology?
It is a very broad concept. It is the use of technologies to eventually, at one extreme, be able to replace the reasoning capacity of a human being. The thing is that today we are living in a very early stage of artificial intelligence. At the moment there are two major streaks of what is happening. On the one hand, there is the development of IOT (internet of things, IOT for its acronym in English) solutions. IOT is a concept in which all devices are connected in some way through the internet; not only connected but also downloading information. With the IOT can generate a qualitative change in people's lives.
On the other hand, you have artificial intelligence that takes a lot of relevant information about something and generates certain analyses on that information. When you combine the two things, you find that it is going to generate, in a short time, a qualitative change in people's lives.
What kind of changes?
In everything you can imagine. At Expand, for example, one of the things we do is to be able to record conversations with customers. Companies are interested in knowing how we serve customers and evaluate whether the agents met certain quality standards within the service. For example, if they opened the call with "good morning", "good afternoon", "good evening"; if they closed the call with "thank you for choosing our services"; or if in the middle they mentioned the products they have to sell. So what we do automatically, using artificial intelligence, is to census if all those quality patterns appear in that recording. We do it in real time and automatically. What used to involve having a group of people listening to recordings, the new feature automates that process at high speed. We process 1,000 minutes of audio - 16 hours - in less than five minutes. That means there's an increase in efficiency.
This is a case of artificial intelligence applied to a quality care process, but it can be applied to a thousand things. In health is an area where it is being used a lot. I am convinced that IOT is going to revolutionize the world in a very short time.
Where is the technology business going today?
The speed with which technologies evolve makes you have to evolve faster to generate products and services. There is no doubt that IOT is one of the branches of this business.
Connectivity is something that will continue to be there, but with increasingly smaller margins. And what companies have to do is diversify, which means creating solutions to problems that exist today.
Source: The Observer
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