In October 2021 Field Service News hosted the inaugural European Field Service Awards to celebrate the ingenuity and excellence of an industry that had kept the world turning as the pandemic swept across the globe.

In the category of Best Technology Innovation there were a number of excellent entries from across the solution providers within our industry, however, it was OverIT who secured the award for their integration of multiple layers of technology including Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Geographic Information Systems within and their FSM platform natively.

The Italian based company who have become a rising star within the FSM sector in recent years have recently hired Paolo Bergamo as their new CEO, a man with an exceptional track record within B2B technology solutions including building the first ever business app on the Apple App store having been asked to do so by Steve Jobs directly.

As a follow up to their acknowledgment at the European Field Service Awards, Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News spoke with Bergamo to discover more about the way our industry is evolving in terms of the technology we have at our fingertips and how we can leverage it to empower our field service engineers and technicians.

It was an engaging discussion that covered:

• From Silicon Valley to the Po Valley. Is it Italy’s time to shine as a tech hub?
• How field service has always had essential workers long before the pandemic
• How quickly will today’s innovation become tomorrow’s table stakes?
• Why it is now non-negotiable to waste the data you generate.
• Can we consider the era we are now in a true technological golden age?
• Is there still a place for on-premise solutions?

In this excerpt from the full discussion the two reflect how within the field service sector we are surrounded by super-heroes, people keeping our world turning who have always been essential workers, long before the term became part of the common lexicon during the pandemic.