About Me
CRIS ICONOMU
BUSINESS TECHNOLOGIST
BUSINESS DESIGN ADVOCATE
OPEN SOURCE PROMOTER
I’m not your average college dropout. I decided to skip school in a post-communist country when opportunities and dangers were at their highest. I was attending the faculty of welding and robotics, and it did not seem so interesting to me in early 1990, especially as the prospect of a free market was becoming very popular in Romanian society – ripe for a change after 50 years of dictatorial communism. So, I quit, tried my luck in business, and never looked back.
However, a lack of specific education and cultural business background made it difficult to start and grow a business successfully. I had to study, source information, and create solutions early in my business career to make up for the missing pieces. I was part of eight business start-ups, each in a different exciting field. From selling luxury office Italian furniture to running marketing campaigns for large food businesses, to designing computerized cutting machines and developing software in competition with the behemoths of the software industry, I did it all. I tried everything I considered exciting and became passionate about it.
I had my fair share of successes and failures, including completely missing a fundamental aspect of the marketplace that killed one of my businesses almost before it started. Throughout the past 30 years, one passion never left me. It made me what I am today: an avid desire to understand how technology can make business processes seamless and more effective in boosting profitability.
A perfectionist, I live with the sensation that everything can be better and continuously pursue an alternative approach to solving a problem. I fight against the status quo because I believe we can achieve more if we don’t get stuck in the old ways and constantly seek new, better ways of doing things.
Business & Technology
After a failed start-up in software in the late 90s and a successful development of computerised cutting machinery, I started a boutique IT business with my family – PRETERION. As it happens, we share a knack for technology and are very good at it.
Throughout the last decade, we pioneered the concept of IT Service Management in Australia. We built the business around the idea that technology should be flowing to the businesses uninterrupted; hence support after something happens is not the better way, and being proactive is much more than setting up backups.
IT support providers should focus on leveraging policies, training and education, and best practices in running infrastructures for their customers.
In 2014, I decided to tackle yet another challenging field, helping businesses implement and deploy digital tools in their processes. Here, I feel the big corporations’ greed is letting us down by caring less (sometimes not at all) about the needs and wants of their customer base and chasing only the bottom line. Initially, my goal was to share and promote Open Source software as the better solution for businesses that want to automate processes and introduce efficiencies. One thing led to another, and I noticed a much more significant gap in culture and education: Technology is considered a source of tools and gadgets rather than a core component of everyday business operations. This approach leads to a significant disconnect between business processes and digital automation.
In the meantime, thanks to the rollout of the NBN infrastructure, the telecommunications industry finally caught up with the modern world, and VoIP became a standard solution.
I have been providing VoIP solutions to my customers since 2007, promoting both commercial (3CX and Asterisk-based boxes) and Open Source phone systems solutions, together with flexible SIP trunking with unlimited calls included
Business Design
I spent the last ten years researching, designing, and adjusting my approach to business planning with modern concepts that align with our new environment. What started as a need to find tools to explain better how digital tools can help a business grow evolved into a completely new concept that uses modern business design tools to develop business strategies for the digital space.
To begin using these tools and concepts, I built a social network aimed at entrepreneurs and consultants connected to the various areas of interest – business strategy, digital marketing, DevOps and others. ViBuNe – The Virtual Business Network has grown into an entity running online platforms to help and support my work and my team. Most importantly, our customers and partners also use everything we have built. As most of our solutions are Open Source, we have the benefit of adapting and customizing them as we need.
ViBuNe is all about Digital Transformation; a concept essentially used to describe the process of migrating business processes to run on digital platforms. However, our approach focuses on re-shaping the business itself – to make it better suited to exist in the digital world.
Rethinking the business model around digital processing is challenging, and we all need a helping hand with it. Today, along with the team of specialists I gathered, I help business entrepreneurs and executives to redesign their businesses and processes around this concept. If you are curious about how I do this or have a digital problem to solve, don’t hesitate to contact me using the form below. I’m always happy to chat about business and technology!