About

Maria Strada is a business lawyer with extensive multinational experience in the information technology and computer industry, previously working at the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Oracle Italia and Lucent Technologies. In her current role as head of commercial and legal Italy, she has overall responsibility for sales and commercial negotiation support services and legal affairs for the country whilst keeping an international breadth, and supporting international bid teams on larger deals, as necessary. Strada is currently being requested to concentrate on Italy, as one of the top ten countries she oversees. However in the past she has also managed Greece and Israel. Managing a small team made up of herself and a contract manager, Strada admits that the role is more about managing the day-to-day business, working continuously to ensure proper involvement at all levels early enough to avoid potential risk. She also adds that equally importantly, her role entails ‘making people understand that nobody can be an expert on all and everything therefore fighting to keep the budget for external expenditure at a level that makes sense given the variety of topics and issues we normally face; the cooperation with the law firms in panel is great and has been helping me these past years [in] growing credibility locally and internationally’. Amongst her roles of responsibility, as legal manager, Strada represents Fujitsu in panels on legal and technological subject matters and conversely as the commercial manager she is responsible for contributing to the shaping of sales and commercial proposals, supporting respectively sales in contract negotiations and delivery in contract management. Prior to this role, she had an impressive career at Hewlett-Packard, joining in 2003 as a strategic negotiator for the EMEA region and working her way up to commercial contract manager in 2009, and eventually to head of commercial contract manager for Italy, France, Iberia and the Nordics. In this role she led a team of over 30 highly skilled professionals dedicated to supporting large accounts and working with peers in EMEA, the Americas and Asia Pacific to align the overall organisation structure. She also had roles at Oracle Italia, Lucent Technologies Italia and Avaya as a contract specialist and assistant legal counsel.