I did not begin my career with a grand plan to become an international commercial executive. I arrived at Indis after a technology training programme organised through Regione Lombardia. The company looked at me and decided, quite correctly, that I was probably more useful on the commercial side than the technical one.
That decision ended up shaping the next three decades of my working life.
The product was not an app
Indis was an OEM of Digital Equipment Corporation. The systems we sold ran on DEC VAX and MicroVAX platforms, and the customers were often manufacturing companies looking for better ways to manage information and operations.
It is difficult to explain to someone who started working after the web became universal just how different the technology conversation was then. There was no browser, no cloud, no SaaS subscription and no assumption that every employee would have a computer connected to everything else.
Technology was physical, expensive and consequential. Buying an enterprise system meant hardware, software, implementation, training and a decision that could remain with a company for years.
For the salesperson, that changed the nature of the conversation. You were not selling a feature. You were asking a company to change part of the way it worked.
I learned sales by learning the business first
I was young and I certainly did not understand everything I was selling on day one. What I discovered quickly was that technical vocabulary alone was not enough.
A manufacturing company did not care that a system was impressive because of the machine underneath it. It cared about whether information could be organised more effectively, whether management had better visibility and whether the investment would solve a real operating problem.
That distinction stayed with me throughout my career.
Technology becomes commercially interesting only when someone can connect it to a business problem.
I would later sell telecommunications capacity, international calling products, trade intelligence and AI-enabled propositions. The technologies changed completely. The commercial question did not.
The distance between technology and business was much wider
Today a founder can build a working software prototype in days, sometimes hours. In 1989, even relatively modest business systems sat on top of specialised hardware, technical teams and a much more formal purchasing process.
That made the salesperson a translator between two worlds. Engineers understood the system. The client understood the business. Someone had to make sure they were talking about the same problem.
I liked that position.
I was never the person who wanted to disappear into the machine. I was interested in what the machine could enable, who would buy it, why they would buy it and how you could make the case for change.
What looks primitive now felt advanced then
It is easy to look back at VAX and MicroVAX systems from the world of smartphones, cloud computing and generative AI and think of them as ancient technology.
That is not how they felt.
They felt powerful. They represented modernisation. Companies were moving from paper-heavy processes and isolated information towards integrated systems that could support management decisions in completely new ways.
Every technology generation feels permanent while you are inside it.
Then something else arrives.
The first lesson of a long technology career
When I think back to 1989, the most useful lesson is not nostalgia for old computers. It is how quickly the tools change and how slowly the underlying commercial questions do.
What problem are we solving? Who benefits? What changes for the customer? What risk are they taking by adopting it? Why now?
Those questions mattered when enterprise software ran on a VAX. They mattered when telecommunications markets were deregulating. They mattered during the first wave of internet businesses. They matter today when everyone is trying to understand what AI will actually do.
The machines changed.
The need to make technology useful did not.
