Fabio Pellegrino

Despite leading the system integration of Sunrise and UPC following one of the largest mergers of two companies in recent Swiss history, Fabio Pellegrino, Senior Director Platform Delivery describes himself as “not your traditional IT guy.”

Pellegrino moved to his IT role for the telecommunications company 15 years ago. “I was working in customer care and got to know first-hand what our customers were looking for and what makes the ultimate customer experience.

“As the company grew, I started to offer tech support to our helpline and went on to oversee the system integration when Sunrise merged with UPC in 2020.

“During the merger, my role was to safeguard the IT department overall.

“Together more Wow” is what the customers of Sunrise UPC are now promised by Pellegrino. “I am able to bring the emotional intelligence to my role in IT and like to use technology as an enabler for our customers to have the best experience. As a movie lover myself, I can’t wait for all the new film releases and enjoy watching them at home on my couch.

“I am particularly proud that we will be sponsoring the Swiss Ski Team for the next 10 years. We have always focused on sport with our MySports channel and online platform esports.ch and top tennis player Roger Federer is one of our ambassadors. Furthermore, we are partnering with the athletes network.”

Pellegrino is excited by the potential power of this merger, which will offer intelligent connectivity of the future and feels the company is now perfectly placed to meet the changing habits of their customers, who have adopted hybrid working due to the pandemic, and offer even more business power to the self-employed, SMEs and large-scale companies.

“In the last few years, it has become clear that the various levels of support in IT are coming with a high percentage of administration effort, which makes the overall process slow and somehow cumbersome. With Agile, the gathering of the requirements, the development cycles for an MVP and the testing has been improved massively, but it’s not enough. 

“Through DevOps, we were able to use the best of Agile and move steps further, by implementing a high automation grade in all the technical activities, allowing us to deploy and release by one fingertips. 

DevOps is more, we engage the developer in all the stages of delivery, so they are engaged with the customer and the various steps, he’s also the best in fixing an issue in his area as he developed it,” commented Pellegrino. 

“It’s not only about the delivery, but it’s also a good way of engaging and enabling the experts as they move from an isolated view of code to an end-to-end view of the service of functionality. This will also open up to a better management of dependencies of technical level and therefore improving the stability of the platform.” 

Commenting on what makes an effective leader, Pellegrino said: “Clear communication and the ability to listen to people. This was especially crucial during the pandemic. I always try to support colleagues and I think it’s important to have trust in your team.” 

Pellegrino studied at the University of St Gallen.

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