From a Roman garage to the depths of the Mediterranean; from selling computers to laying submarine cables: a journey spanning half a century. With the same thread running through it all: curiosity for innovation, attention to people. “And courage, yes, that too: without it, you need to find another line of work…” Renato Brunetti watches his Unidata, of which he is one of the founders, turn forty in 2025. If the company were a person, you’d say: it has entered the age when you start to understand life. When you play at the adults’ table. Looking at what Unidata has done so far, but especially at what it has begun to aspire to, the analogy seems to hold.
So, forty years. What happened? How did we get here?
Rome, the seventies
Two twenty-somethings with a passion for computing. “Marcello Vispi (another Unidata founder) and I worked at Saga, a pioneering microcomputer company,” Brunetti explains. “They sold Italian computers made by the Roman company Mael, manufactured in Abruzzo. They were designed for scientific calculations but were programmable. They had been a huge success in Germany.” Among the investors in Mael was Franco Pesci, husband of actress Virna Lisi.
Here came the first insight from the Brunetti-Vispi duo: apply these computers to business. The next step was to start producing their own computers, “copying the American ones. Today it would be absurd to even think about it; you’d need billions.” These were computers running the CP/M operating system, but then IBM came along with DOS, and here too the partners sensed the future: IBM had published its computer schematics, making it possible to produce them independently.
But meanwhile Saga went bankrupt. “We were good technicians but bad managers.” And so Bronzino Srl was born. “A name invented by Claudio Bianchi. I never understood what it meant.” Bianchi would become the third partner in what is now Unidata, the new name for Bronzino starting in 1985.
“Unidata was the name of Philips and Siemens’ attempt to build European mainframes together. It didn’t work out, but I liked the name, so we adopted it.”
New name, same garage though. “The one at my house, where we assembled PCs and resold them.” The first office came in the Clodio area, “then the second, larger headquarters. Actually the third, the first was the garage…” says Brunetti. Unidata had about twenty people and lived on the margins, sky-high at the time, from PC resale.
The turning point: 1994
“Someone came to me to whom I’ll always be grateful. He said, look, there’s this thing called the internet.” That someone was Paolo Bevilacqua, who also had the idea of creating the first NAP, or Neutral Access Point, in Rome, which became NAMEX (1995). Unidata was also doing LANs at the time, and “imagining connecting computers in a network that isn’t a private LAN but wraps around the entire world was fascinating to me.”
A revolution, “and one that traditional telcos underestimated at the time. We became an ISP, and Telecom Italia only followed three years later.” Back then, about 2 million out of Unidata’s 10 million in revenue came from ISP work. The internet bubble had yet to burst; in fact, it was at its peak: “In 1999 we received an offer we couldn’t refuse from Cable & Wireless. Multiples of our revenue, to buy us out.”
The bubble burst. The new owner “had destroyed everything, employees risked being left high and dry. So we decided to buy it back for almost nothing. They were happy to get rid of it.” Unidata had reached about fifty employees before the bubble burst. “We started over from zero revenue and about twenty employees.”
The lowest point before the climb.
Building the backbone
The business model was buying access to Telecom’s conduits under regulated conditions and filling them with fiber, which now totals 7,900 kilometers. “We had the idea of doing it ourselves, certainly in a localized way.”
The stock listing was an adventure too: “In 2020, in the middle of COVID-19. The stock exchange was physically closed, and we were the only IPO in the first six months of that year.” That same year, Unifiber was born to deploy FTTH in the gray areas of Lazio, through an agreement with the CEBF fund. Unidata’s first partnership with a fund to play a bigger game.
In 2023, they acquired Milan-based TWT, bringing revenue to 100 million euros. “Half ours, half from acquisition.”
A feverish year. Unitirreno Submarine Network also arrived, and here the fund enabling the leap was Azimut Libera Impresa. Unitirreno is also the name of the submarine fiber system in the Tyrrhenian Sea, connecting Mazara del Vallo to Genoa, with hubs in Rome-Fiumicino and Olbia. Completed in September 2025.
Unidata had spotted a national gap. “I’ve always been passionate about submarine cables, but in the Mediterranean they’re old, at end of life. We didn’t have our own backbone. There was only Sparkle, but they dedicated only four fibers of their cable to Italy, and those are already saturated.”
Unitirreno gives Italy 24. For domestic traffic, “but it also serves to strengthen international collection in Sicily and Genoa. Now Italy, with Unitirreno, has a backbone with 500 terabit capacity.”
An underwater Autostrada del Sole looking toward future greatness for our country. A candidate to be the epicenter of traffic growth between the West, Africa, and the Near East. Consider this: all of Africa currently has only 20 terabits of submarine capacity.
With this growth vision in mind, “we built the first landing station in Mazara del Vallo and hope to host other cables, creating synergy with Unitirreno,” says Brunetti.
The cable cost 70 million euros. “Unidata couldn’t do it alone. Hence the need to partner with international funds.”
Playing with the giants
But isn’t this history repeating itself? Like when in a Roman garage they played at being IBM, before American and Asian giants made the PC business prohibitive for “normal” companies?
“The submarine cable business is also populated by giants, yes. But there’s a difference from competition in the PC world: what we’re building is our own infrastructure that provides stable competitive positioning.” “These are assets that can be leveraged to compete precisely because they’re non-replicable infrastructure. Funds understand this and are willing to invest.” “With digital products and services, on the other hand, you need enormous scale or have to do niche things to compete.”
Moreover, “Unidata can leverage the technical expertise it has built up, the operations and NOC already in place,” to enter the cable business.
Passion for cables, meaning passion for innovation; intuition about a gap in the country’s present and especially its future. And that dose of courage needed to do this work, as Brunetti mentioned.
The hidden ingredient
Is this the Unidata recipe? Actually, somewhat hidden in its history, there’s another ingredient: attention to sustainability. To people and the environment. A benefit corporation since 2022; data centers partly powered by solar energy; various social projects undertaken by Unidata, such as connecting prisons for educational and rehabilitative activities.
In embryo, it was already there in 2002 when they decided to buy back the company destroyed by Cable & Wireless. “We come from the lower-middle class. My father was a tram driver,” says Brunetti. “So it comes easy to identify with ordinary people.”
“Maybe otherwise we wouldn’t have done the buyback. We would have kept the money from the sale and focused on simpler businesses.”
“It might sound romantic, but we wanted to give the company continuity and do things right.”
— By Alessandro Longo, journalist
