The Future of Infrastructure: Why I Chose Asset Management

Hello. Welcome to transforming asset management, a video series where we discuss key asset management topics and share our tips from the industry. I'm Renuka, and today I have with me Michael Loicano, vice president here at Brightly. Our topic of discussion today is building a better future, Why I Choose Infrastructure Asset Management. Thanks for joining us today, Mai. Can I ask you, I know you spent fifteen years, with, Siemens before joining Brightly doing Power Grid? And what made you the transition to infrastructure asset management? Well, thank you so much, Renuka. For me, it was all about making a tangible impact on our community. And when we just look out the window, what do we see? We see our community. We see the communities where we live, where we work, where we play, where we raise our families. And to a large extent, the way we experience those communities is linked to the quality of the assets, the quality of the infrastructure. When we drive to work in the morning, do we encounter a lot of potholes? When we drive our kids to soccer practice do we often find ourselves stuck in traffic? When we drive over that one bridge every day do we feel safe? And unfortunately on a global scale we have a major challenge, and the challenge is called the infrastructure deficit. The infrastructure deficit simply refers to the gap between what we actually invest in our infrastructure to maintain it versus what the investment should be just to maintain a a basic level of functionality in those in those assets and that infrastructure. And the problem is that on a global scale, our infrastructure deficit is fifteen trillion dollars, roughly fifteen percent. And the biggest contributors to that deficit are our power grids and our roads. So to answer your original question, I spent a good amount of time tackling the power grids challenge, and now I have an opportunity to attack attack some of the other challenges around our infrastructure deficit. What made you decide to join Brightly specifically? One of my favorite quotes, Renuka, is from the hockey player Wayne Gretzky. He said, skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is or where it has been. And I'll never forget the moment I learned that brightly was going to become a part of Siemens because I knew in that moment that I wanted to be a part of it because that's where the puck was going. And what do I mean by that? If you go back to what we were talking about earlier regarding the infrastructure deficit, in the US alone, our infrastructure deficit is thirty percent, just under four trillion dollars And to put that into perspective, dollars four trillion is roughly equivalent to fifteen percent of the entire US economy. So how do you tackle a challenge at that scale? You can only accomplish it when the right mix of ingredients and players come together through the right mix of technology and expertise. And I knew through what Brightly brings to the table, which just to name a few things, is twelve thousand customers, almost half a trillion dollars in assets managed over twenty years. When you combine that with the deep time tested technology leadership and experience of Siemens, a company that has a massive global footprint in almost every country on the planet, when you combine those ingredients, I just knew in that moment that this was a very magical unique combination that was gonna give us as a society the best chance at tackling some of these major issues that that face us. And I knew that that was something I wanted to be a part of. What do you find the most inspiring about your role? What I find inspiring about the role is how tangible the impact is on our everyday lives. And I think about my wife who is an architect and I've always been envious of my wife because of how tangible her creations are. You know, she gets to design these incredible structures that then get physically constructed and you can interact with them and you can feel them and you experience them. And it's much the same here when we think about the infrastructure and the communities we live in and the impact we make there. When I walk to work every morning, I can feel that. Our clients include the cities where we live and the assets that those cities own and maintain. And knowing that our software and our experts play a key role in shaping those assets and how we interact with them on a daily basis is one of the most satisfying parts of the job. What do you hope to achieve in the future with Brightree? I'd like to redefine what good looks like when it comes to our communities. I'm not here to solve incremental problems. I'm here to do what Siemens and Brightly have consistently proven that they've done over a long period of time, which is completely transform industries to help our clients and to help society reimagine what's even possible and to unleash that really magical combination of technology and expertise in order to inspire an entire future generation to carry that forward. Thank you for stopping by. And please like, share, and follow, and watch out for more interesting videos. Thank you.