Haroldo Jacobovicz: Engineer of Ideas That Transform the World — Company Leaders
A trained, educated, and qualified civil engineer, entrepreneur Haroldo Jacobovicz, has the gift of seeing beyond the visible and transforms ideas into solutions for management, productivity and development.
After seven years of Military College and four and a half years of Civil Engineering at the Federal University of Paraná, Haroldo Jacobovicz, began his professional career. During the 1980s, instead of traditional civil engineering and construction, the young Curitiba native was attracted by the potential of Information Technology. In that capacity, he has been a prime mover and head of companies in the area of software and hardware services since 1990, telecommunications since 2010 and currently in cloud communications.
The eldest of four brothers, son of Alfredo — civil engineer and university professor; and Sarita only the seventh female civil engineer in her state — Haroldo followed his parents’ paths. However, it was the new technology not yet fully established, that made his eyes sparkle.
With an insatiable curiosity about what happens on our planet, he has always been an avid and voracious reader of newspapers and magazines. That reading in addition to information acquisition has made Haroldo both a visionary as well as a person well grounded in reality.
Aware that success requires hard work and talent to identify opportunities, he also counted on luck. He brought together three friends with computer skills before graduation and created Microsystem. The goal was to serve stores, pharmacies and supermarkets with the automation of inventory and cash control. The retail market, however, was not ready for automation. In less than a year, the company closed and, undaunted, Haroldo moved on.
If small businesses were not prepared for the new wave Haroldo saw coming, big business certainly was. That’s when he learned that Esso, now Exxon Mobil Corporation, an American multinational in the oil distribution sector, was hiring. After a battery of testing and group dynamics, he was selected from a highly qualified group of more than 200 engineers. There, in less than a year, he went from a reserve salesman to a market analyst in the South region until he became responsible for commercial tactics and new business at the Brazilian headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. His work was based on his expertise in analyzing computer-processed data.
The challenges in the multinational milieu were motivating, but the price freeze that affected the energy industry at the time of the Crusader Plan was one reason he left Esso to join a project that was at its peak: the Itaipu Hydroelectric Power Plant. The pressure on fuel prices, coupled with his distance from family members were instrumental in his next job change. He took over as advisor to the Technical Director of the state-owned company, back in the capital of Paraná.
Computerization, which had grown in the private sector, reached the public sector. He foresaw the difficulty in adoption of computers in the face of bureaucracy and its reluctance to quickly turn over capital assets in the face of rapidly developing information technology.
After four years at the state-owned company, it was time for him to resume his original plan — to have his own business in the technology sector. With his experience in the multinational and state-owned company in his résumé, along with his past brief entrepreneurial efforts, he now had a new business vision.
Focusing on public agencies, he created the company Minauro for the rental and maintenance of computers. He offered four-year contracts with hardware change every 18 months, including maintenance. Unprecedented, the solution was eagerly accepted and won several bids in the south and southeast of the country.
Shortly thereafter, in addition to hardware, he incorporated tax, financial, administrative, health and education management software after the acquisitions of Consult, Perform and Sisteplan companies. The new e-Governe Group was created, with a national reputation for solutions to serve the public power in information technology. That reputation continues to the present day in several Brazilian municipalities.
In order to reach the corporate market, Horizons Telecom was built from the ground up in 2010 from the best available technical, human and strategic resources. The original project, improved upon by Ernst Young, was conceived by electrical engineer Renato Guerreiro, first president of Anatel, who died in 2011. Prepared for total convergence, with 100% fiber network, multi-point redundancy and the most advanced equipment in the market, Horizons Telecom is widely recognized among the best telecommunications suppliers in the country. In 2020, Horizons Datacenter began operations.
With network infrastructure, cloud communication solutions and more than 30 years of IT expertise, his continuing plan is to accelerate the digital transformation of modern society. That acceleration is through dedication to quality, security, stability and superior service. The prospect of improving the day-to-day life of companies and people’s daily lives is what moves Haroldo Jacobovicz. His main goal: to contribute to a better world.
Originally published at http://companyleaders.org on December 16, 2020.
