Agostinho Villela will lead Scala's automation and innovation initiatives, working across four main pillars: risk mitigation, quality improvement, delivery time reduction and greater efficiency. He will also double down on the firm's sustainability commitments, for example on energy efficiency. On this, Scala highlighted matching the supply and demand of renewable energy; energy supply in places that are difficult to reach via the electrical network; and alternative ways of cooling in data centres.
Villela said: "We will evaluate a wide range of technological options, which may involve the use of unsupervised machine learning, predictive models to characterise and anticipate problems, computer vision to ensure the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in constructions sites and data centres, and even identifying what action people are taking."
With more than 34 years of experience, Villela is part of a select group of professionals in Latin America and around the world to hold the position of Distinguished Engineer at IBM, one of the highest recognitions in the company's technical career. Over his near 14 years with IBM he was its worldwide representative in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), member senior at IBM Academy of Technology worldwide, and IBM Quantum Ambassador.
In 2017 he established the IBM Brazil innovation garage and, in 2020, the Brazil 5G Telecommunications Solutions Lab. He is the co-author of a patent on cybersecurity (digital printing of devices), is responsible for a patent submission on caching for assistants based on voice and co-authored of a Redbook on distributed computing programming.
His specialist areas include SDN, IoT, Blockchain, AI, Quantum Computing and 5G.
Scala co-founder and CTO Marcos Peigo said: "With Villela joining our executive team, we are taking an important step to have the innovation permeating the entire company in a deep and transversal way. We will be even more focused on bringing intelligence to the processes, services and operation of our data centers and, thus, better scaling our clients' digital infrastructure."
