Paul Rellis, CEO of Viatel Technology Group

After 17 several years at Microsoft, Paul Rellis has expended the earlier 4 many years heading up the Viatel Technological innovation Team. He sat down with Ann O’Dea to go over main by way of a pandemic, digital transformation and the future of enterprise.

The last time I sat down to job interview Paul Rellis, he was place supervisor for Microsoft in Eire. So I was keen to catch up on his most current journey as CEO of the Viatel Technology Group, exactly where he has found the indigenous company’s workforce triple in sizing and develop, like by means of the acquisition of Digiweb and ActionPoint.

We started our discussion by hunting again at his 17 decades he expended at Microsoft, the two in Ireland and abroad. “Microsoft was an unquestionably fantastic experience, a amazing business and fantastic people,” he states. “I acquired and designed so a lot, and I think  we actually underestimate what corporations like that have completed in Ireland for so quite a few men and women.  They’ve invested in individuals, utilized so quite a few, developed so many men and women and it is been, for me personally, a great journey.”

Rellis joined Microsoft in 2000 from Coca-Cola in Germany, in which he was living with his wife Lisa, due to the fact, he suggests, he required to join a “leader in the engineering industry”.

Ireland was a pretty distinct place then, and the ‘born on the internet’ giants like Google and Facebook experienced not still arrived. “If you go again 20 a long time it was incredibly a great deal Intel, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, a few of large world-wide providers. Of course, now that has exploded into a lot of organizations delivering loads of services  and numerous of them are housed here in Dublin,” states Rellis.

“It’s excellent, the possibilities people have nowadays to opt for enterprise X or company Y. It indicates you can emphasis on striving to come across the correct fit for oneself and it forces businesses to be better organised as well, and to be a great deal more  open up to all forms of persons, all varieties of abilities,  because if they really don’t, they just won’t get the  individuals.”

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Rellis believes Ireland and Dublin are really properly positioned now in the world wide economy. “The thing I’d enjoy to see additional of is individuals shifting out of the larger organisations over time and into Irish corporations, and taking all the learnings they have from there and kind of bringing it to everyday living in other companies. And that is occurring much more and additional.”

And of training course it is not just Dublin, as Rellis can testify. Viatel Engineering Team has groups in Dublin, Dundalk and Limerick these days, with company predominantly focused in Eire, but its sights are established on shifting more afield in coming 5 decades, he claims.

Presented Viatel’s enterprise in telecoms, facts centres and infrastructure, it was of system designated a ‘key industry’ during the pandemic, so while so a great deal of the world switched off, substantially of Rellis’s group have been tough at work. “A whole lot of our  men and women, our workforce, ended up out there preserving the lights on over the past two a long time in the  hardest of times for our business customers and buyers, so we really feel  like we have performed a huge function in undertaking that,” he suggests.

Viatel started off everyday living as a telecoms  company 20-odd a long time in the past and was introduced collectively by acquisition and  advancement of firms. “It has a extremely successful consumer manufacturer known as Digiweb, a very productive small business brand called Viatel, and we obtained Motion Level, a very thriving managed services and cloud computing partner in Limerick past 12 months,” points out Rellis. “So we’re increasing exceptionally very well, which is good.”

Nowadays, Rellis oversees a team of some 300, a trebling from 100 when he very first joined. “It seems like it was all plain sailing and all really quick, and of course it wasn’t,” he states. “The to start with two years of my time there, we truly experienced to aim on  receiving ourselves proper, getting the team correct, the products proper, consumer assistance, all these points.”

It was a course of action that was effective, he states, and nowadays he thinks the enterprise has the appropriate products and answers for the time we are in. “There’s quite handful of times in organization exactly where you have that genuinely superior experience of momentum behind you, and that is the sensation we have ideal now.”

Lessons in leadership 

With quite a few decades in management roles, the interview is well worthy of a enjoy for some top leadership lessons he has discovered, but a single is about having a tough search at on your own as a chief.

“I’d be strongly encouraging every leader to fully grasp their own strengths and weaknesses and really take individuals to coronary heart and test and improve on those over time, so that they’re strolling the chat,” claims Rellis. “Because when folks see more senior persons or leaders focusing on on their own, attempting to strengthen on their own, taking all their vacations, being energised, executing all the correct things, it actually genuinely helps make a variation.”

It’s one of numerous positives that could possibly appear of out of the rough pandemic years, he tells me. “I imagine, ironically, it could be really good for enterprise. Probably we experienced kind of achieved peak efficiency and leaders remaining so focused and variety of forgetting about on their own. So it’s going to be interesting to see the effect in the coming yrs,” he claims.

Check out the total interview previously mentioned. Paul Rellis has met his honest share of great and bad leaders in his several roles more than the many years, so he has a good deal of a must have learnings to share.

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