Tom Peruzzi's thoughts on digital, innovation, IT and operations

Hi

I am Thomas (Tom) Peruzzi, around 40 years old, married, 3 children. Even if I learned economics I always was a Tec geek. Doing so I decided to get a University degree in Telecommunications in 1999. Afterwards I went to Munich to Compuserve, being bought by AOL which gave me the great opportunity to not only being in charge of the CMS for compuserve but for netscape and aol.de too. With Time Warner in background I worked on several European editorial systems too (cms, commenting and rating …).

In 2003 I decided to start my own journey, my own company aicooma. I built it up to roughly 20 people doing consulting for operations, architecture and processes for digital and online media companies in Mid Europe. Beside that I continued doing IT strategy stuff, interims CTO (turnaround for a date center provider conova.com) and due diligences. As such I was part of the DD team selling AOL Germany, supporting the carve out and reintegration afterwards. I did tec. and product due diligences for wunderloop, publigroup, gruner+jahr, burda, pro7, deutsche Post and some private investors (in fact I keep on due diligencing 🙂 )
In 2011 I decided to leave and sell my own company to have more time for startup advisory and other fun stuff like making a Master in Leading Innovation and Change at York St. John’s University. Till that time I do advice young startups in the area of product, innovation and technology (laterpay.de, meinkauf.at and admoment.ru) micro-invest in different companies (avocadostore.de, whyown.it, nanosatisfi) and do interims CTO jobs (currently Internet-of-Things company gigaset-elements.de). (More to find here)

In 2006 I invented OpenITIL with the idea to create an open ITSM process pool. After starting the project I took it over to Lisog (www.lisog.de) where I was board-member for another 3 years. The idea of OpenITIL allowed me to write my first printed article in an academic book and to act as a speaker at a congress by St. Gallen University.

I am a free editor for gruenderszene.de (and formerly silicon.de) writing about tec. stuff like what due diligences look for, cloud topics … and I do lecturing at some Universities with topics like cloud computing, information security and technical innovation management. Some times I do act as a speaker or as a judge in a pitch event.

My interests in Technology are big-data, massive parallel requests, multi-tier-caching, multi-datacenter approaches, global loadbalancing, smart architectures and resilience and reliability. I’m a great fan of team-building in multi-language, multi-country teams with internals and externals. Outside Tech I’m a sailor, do Wing Tsun and Escrima and go jogging.

In 2014 I founded and organized the first roboter hackathon in Salzburg and I am a mentor and advisor to the TU Vienna incubator i2c.

For the last couple of years I often acted as an Interims CTO for companies like gigaset elements (First IOT platform in Germany), ifolor (analog photo production, 100% digital sales funnel in Switzerland), laterpay (micropayment platform in Germany) and spilgames (leading publisher of casual games moving now towards mobile in Netherlands). In 2017 I decided to join Virtual Minds AG as a member of the board.

I still do advisory and due diligences.