As a marketer for Pall, Daniel Alessandri is used to asking questions of his suppliers, peers and colleagues. But answering them? In print? PES puts a selection of slightly more personal questions to one of the industry’s most influential figures.
PES: Welcome to PES magazine, can you firstly explain a little about your role, and how it relates to the wind industry?
Daniel Alessandri: I oversee some of the marketing activities of the power generation division at Pall, a leader in filtration and separations in a wide variety of industries. I currently focus a lot on Europe, the Middle East and Africa. I also lead a couple of global strategic initiatives, one of which is to increase our activity in the wind energy segment.
PES: How did you first become involved in the industry (what’s your career background)?
DA: I joined Pall in 1994 after engineering studies in France and Connecticut and service in the French air force. I always had a passion for energy and turbo machines, airplanes, turbines, rockets and the like. At the age of eight I would line up paper airplanes on the kitchen table and modify wing profiles in sequence to see which affected gliding the most.
And 15 years later I wrote my thesis on fuel mixing characteristics inside a scramjet engine – very different, but all stemming from the same fascination. Once at Pall, I held various commercial positions within the power generation division. Among the portfolio of mini-markets we serve is wind energy.
I specifically started to look after it upon my return to Europe in 2003. Since then, wind turbine applications became the focus of many product and commercial developments at Pall. But my interest marketing and strategy really developed during my MBA in New York.
PES: Which part of your job excites you the most?
DA: Part of my job is to look ahead and try to make sense of possible technology developments, trends, policies and I do enjoy the intellectual freedom and challenges that comes with it. But it’s always a little impersonal and even lonely sometimes. So I get real excitement when this prospective analysis coalesces into strategies, plans and action that people stand behind, convinced, motivated, driven. Seeing ideas and strategies turned into actions that people embrace is really my favorite part of the job
