Meet NTT DATA People
Marco Iusi
Head of Google cloud competence centre
Marco Iusi is from Calabria in the southern part of Italy where he grew up and has lived his whole life. He is thankful for the opportunity to work in a large multi-national company without having uproots from Calabria and move to a bigger city. This is because, where he grew up has been his inspiration in life and work. In other words, to be given the opportunity to work at NTT DATA and achieve something special in the world of technology has been good for him and his community. In his free time Marco loves to have a good time with his family and friends, enjoys doing and watching sporting activities, helps coordinate blood donation activities and is an administrator in the village where he lives.
Every day at NTT DATA we try to achieve the common goal of making life better for all people.
Tell us about an interesting project.
I am responsible for running the Google Cloud Competence Centre where we define strategy, deal with partnership management, coordinate with salespeople and handle technical scope too. In this role I have been able to leverage my experience in technology to put in place cloud and open-source solutions. The role also allows to me to work with younger people, who I can help grow their careers. In addition, I am the entry point for Google Cloud initiatives, I have direct relationships with partner managers, and I am I have a very good connection with all-things-Google. In fact, I was recently in California to have a meeting at Google headquarters, which for me represented achieving a personal dream of visiting the birthplace of modern technology and computing.
What I love most about this work, from an NTT DATA perspective, is to have the opportunity to work with Google as a partner. The projects I work on are also important for society because right now cloud computing is essential for life and business. That’s why having a strong partnership between a technology provider like Google and a systems integrator like NTT DATA achieves a common goal of making life better for everyone.
Describe a regular working day.
Since 2020 our practice area grew rapidly but more than 60% of the new hires were fresh out of university and so had never worked in an office before. At the same time, we all had to work from home anyway due to the pandemic. So, I had to devise ways to stay present with new people on the projects I was running. To do this, I called each person at least once a week to check in on them.
Recently however, we have been going back to the office for a portion of the week, which for me and for us in Italy is important because we value close person-to-person interactions. So, even though we still work at home sometimes, we also devise ways to work closely at the office including finding times to connect with each other over coffee.
Why do you like life at NTT DATA?
Let me explain this from the perspective of an idea that grew out of a competition but has become very important for our company and me. In 2015 I entered a hackathon, organized globally by NTT DATA, and proposed adopting our technology to monitor and improve water management. My team won a prize for this idea and our company decided to sponsor its development as a prototype. I was the project manager for the development of the prototype, and it quickly grew into something much larger and significant and in 2019 was adopted by a large water company in the Rome area after a competitive tender. We also won the NTT DATA AWARD 2022 with this project.
Being given the opportunity by NTT DATA to propose "bottom-up" ideas and having the chance to develop them to their conclusion is something I am proud of and thankful for. This is why I love life at NTT DATA.