“Digitalization allows you to increase profits with the same costs”

At DATAlife we have the luxury of partners such as Gradiant, a technology center specialized in connectivity, intelligence and digital security. For those who still do not know, we could say that they are not a university or a company, but they put the two worlds in contact. They bring research projects to reality and transform all that knowledge into concrete tools for SMEs. Without a doubt, they know the strengths and weaknesses of our business ecosystem… Do you want to know more?  

Luis Pérez Freire, CEO of Gradiant, spoke with us and reflected, from his privileged point of view, on the digitalization process in Galicia. His calm and realistic vision, typical of those who know first-hand what he is talking about, is capable of painting in a few words the situation of key sectors for the economy of our region. In this case we have stopped at the primary sector, especially agriculture, and the health sector and how the commitment to technology is changing the way of doing business.

Gradiant has a very important business area in the primary sector. ¿What is your client’s profile?

We work, above all, with technological SMEs. From Gradiant we develop a technology that must then be integrated into the final solutions. Therefore, our most natural customers are the developers or integrators who will then be responsible for including our systems and marketing them to an end user.

Therefore, our direct client is that developer who needs to include our services in his product or requires some advice on communication, data processing or security issues, for example.

It is true that sometimes we work directly with companies that have the ability to design their own solutions, but, in most cases, we do it with SMEs that seek to add value to their products or integrate a technology that they do not have available.

What do these technological SMEs that focus on the agricultural sector demand from you?

They are technological SMEs that know exactly what their sector or subsector requires. They come to Gradiant with a clear view of what their customers need and with questions such as how to extract value from data, how to manage it and how to leverage it, for example, to obtain different metrics.

They know the challenges they face and that’s where we can help them. Undoubtedly, including technology systematically in the work process of the agricultural world has its own difficulties. Without going any further, capturing the data and sending it poses very interesting challenges. We are not talking about cities where you have coverage and means to capture information and send it in real time. In rural areas, there are still difficulties in doing so automatically and safely.

But, despite all those structural obstacles, they want to go digital. What pushes them to do it?

Basically, they want to take advantage of the data they generate, but in different ways. We can say that there is a first stage in which companies make the leap to digitalization to improve productivity or reduce costs. That is, do better what they are already doing. In a second moment, let’s say of maturity, companies are already more ambitious: they want to take advantage of digital to think about new business models. They no longer seek to optimize processes, but want to take advantage of digital processes to generate activity. Data becomes a very important asset that they want to exploit and protect.

But to take advantage of the data (really) it is important to be able to share it with other companies and other agents. It is important to seek synergies and create an ecosystem, how is this perceived in the agricultural company?

Undoubtedly, sharing data and information with the value chain is a complex issue. It is a sector that has not traditionally worked with information and it is in that process of sharing data that you find more reluctance. There are cases in which it is even difficult to establish to whom the data belongs, think that nowadays data is being captured that is stored on servers, in many cases, proprietary.

I am clear that there are a number of dynamics to break and, although it seems otherwise, this sector is being very dynamic and pioneering both at European and global level. They know that the role that data will play in the immediate future is key and they are taking steps in this direction.

“In recent years we see that technological SMEs have been refocusing and specialising and are already beginning to see the primary sector as an interesting client, a demander of ICT tools”

Information and data management is a very new world for many of them, right?

Yes, in a way it is for everyone. Therefore, we must be clear that it has to be an opportunity to grow and we must prevent unfair disadvantages or monopoly situations. That is why we participate and work on data governance models and even regulations, good practice guides… And, despite being a very new world, we have to make sure we move in the right direction and not make wrong decisions that are then much more complicated to correct.

And from Gradiant, who work at regional, national or European level and have a privileged vision, how do you assess the evolution in Galicia?

In Galicia, like the rest of Europe, it depends a lot on the subsector you look at. For example, the viticulture sector has already been on this journey towards digitalisation for a few years now. It is one of the most advanced in the use of new technologies and has cards in its favor, such as generating higher margins that allows them to invest in competitive technology. They know perfectly well that this process helps them generate a key advantage.

Compared to these leading sectors, we see others that evolve more slowly. Despite this, I do perceive that everything that has to do with precision agriculture begins to pick up speed, although we also have some Achilles heel. For example, on the issues of data cooperatives, which are already being worked on in northern Europe, we are still far from exploiting our full potential.

Do you think that the company in the agricultural sector in Galicia and Spain is interesting for a technological SME?

Yes, definitely. In recent years we see that technological SMEs have been refocusing and specializing and are already beginning to see the primary sector as an interesting client, a demander of ICT tools to take into account.

Now very interesting startups are emerging that try to take advantage of this window of technology applied to the primary sector. All this undertaking will make Galicia, being a community with a very important primary sector already in itself, take advantage of its resources and occupy the place that corresponds to it. It is important that we become aware of this potential, we have to believe it.

And to achieve this, what are our challenges in the agricultural sector?

The entire primary sector in Galicia, if we analyze it in terms of volume, is undoubtedly in the top positions. But if we analyze the added value that is generated, we realize that we still fear a way to go. We have to digitize ourselves to achieve that, with the same costs, a greater profit is generated.

We must reinvent ourselves to increase the benefits of what we are already doing, optimize our processes and take the definitive step to work with new models of exploitation.

Another of the economic sectors in which you work very actively is health and well-being…

Indeed, both hand in hand with the public and private sectors. In this environment the needs are different and the way of working is very different. In the public sector we collaborate with hospitals and biomedical foundations and right now, for example, we are with PERSIST, a large European Big Data and AI project to improve the lives of cancer survivors.

For the development of this type of solutions, it is necessary to involve the users (hospitals and patients) and the companies that will be the providers of hospitals and health systems. But the most important thing for me is that at Gradiant we work with our feet on the ground, responding to real needs. We must be very careful in this aspect so that all the work does not remain in R+D projects stored in a drawer. This is what we are trying to do in this European project: make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. For us, the most satisfying thing is to see that our work becomes a reality and improves the quality of life. It seems simple, but it is not, we must row in the same direction with our technology, suppliers, hospitals, doctors, patients … The equation has to add up for everything to fit.

In addition, I suppose that in this sector a huge amount of data will be generated that requires maximum security …

That’s right. At Gradiant we have been working on projects related to the field of health for many years and much of what we have done goes in the direction of protecting information. We do it from different points of view, from systems to prevent unauthorized access, to technology that allows relevant information about medical data to be extracted in a secure manner. For example, we work a lot with the University of Vigo in this area.

In this sense, we always design an adequate technological environment so as not to put at risk the privacy of people, nor the work of the hospitals that are responsible for guarding such information. We operate in a context of very sensitive data.

In the health sector, it is essential to guarantee the security of data, but also to be able to access, analyze, collate, cross… For medical advancement sharing information must be crucial.

That is why security is critical, we have seen how projects have been paralyzed because they do not see this issue clearly. We must advance in collaboration and access to information, but always with caution. Technology must allow us to work with guarantees and prevent human errors, often not malicious, but we must understand that we work with very critical information.

And finally, we would like to know what the relationship with DATAlife brings you. Why did you get on this train?

We have it and we were always very clear, notice that Gradiant has been a promoter of DATAlife from the beginning. Ours is digital and we want to invest our experience and our work to create a digital environment. That’s why we have to be in DATAlife. The primary sector, health or biotechnology are strategic value chains in Galicia and that is where we want to get our technology.

Thanks to this hub, it is becoming clear that these sectors have to move towards digitalization and the more technological SMEs work for it, the more possibilities we have that our technology ends up reaching users. In this sense, the HIBAproject, for example, will help more technology companies to emerge in agriculture and to grow the technological level in this sector. You do a job that is being worked on all over the world and we want to contribute to increase competitiveness in the near future.

But in addition to contributing, which you certainly do, I guess it’s also an important improvement tool for Gradiant, right?

Of course! We are also very nourished as a technology center thanks to this hub. It allows us to have an instrument to know first-hand the needs of the market and develop a much more focused technology. We know that each SME has its own needs and we seek to solve the transversal needs. Therefore, having this overview provided by DATAlife is very important. You know how to marry supply and demand to end one of the weak points of this technological world: the lack of joint vision.

If in a year we interview you again, tell me three points in which you would like to point out that it has been improved..

What would be very good news is to tell you that there are more technology companies focused on developing specialized solutions and products in Galicia. That in these sectors the creation of startupshas skyrocketed, for example.

I would like to tell you that these technology-based advances are reaching SMEs in the sector and that they already benefit from them in their day to day.

Finally, I would like to affirm that the informative work has achieved that we all speak the same language, that we have been able to transfer to SMEs the benefits of advancing in digitalization and that we have understood in which specific processes we can help them.