Alessandro Bottaioli

Chief Technology Officer & Board Member

Pharmagest Italia develops management software for pharmaceutical distribution and pharmacies: over €10 million in revenue, with about 80% of Italian pharmaceutical wholesalers among its customers.

• Lead R&D and IT for the Wholesalers and Pharmacies Business Units: 47 people across 5 development teams and an IT department running 3 datacenters.
• Two stacks in parallel: ERP/WMS on IBM i (RPG) and .NET solutions for integrations, REST services, automated order-picking robots and web portals.
• Built from scratch an Italian-German development team (11 people) to port the ID pharmacy management system to the German market, and an in-house IT & Security department.
• Moved the department to Agile, standardised new development on .NET and Blazor, and modernised IBM i platforms by exposing them as REST services.
• Led the migration of the management system of a pharmaceutical distributor with over €1 billion in revenue, completed on schedule.
• 3 datacenters with availability above 99.99%, offering customers tiered SLA and disaster recovery levels.
• ISO/IEC 27001 (2024) and ISO/IEC 27017 and 27018 (2026) certifications; leading NIS2 compliance.

Project Manager

• Led the evolution of the Farmaclick protocol and of the company datacenter, used every day by thousands of Italian pharmacies and parapharmacies.
• Moved from hands-on development to coordinating a team of programmers; started development of ID, the new pharmacy management system, in 2017.
• Developed IOKO, a CMS used to build several high-traffic B2B and B2C portals, including Pharmaweb and K4Pharma.
• In 2018 InFarma was acquired by Pharmagest, where I took on the role of CTO.

Programmer

• Designed the Farmaclick protocol in 2005; publishing its specifications drove its adoption across the entire Italian market.
• Developed Java communication interfaces to IBM OS/400 systems, becoming a technical point of reference for the InFarma Group.
• Industrial automation software in Assembler, Visual C++ for Windows and C++ for Linux.

Programmer

Industrial automation software in Assembler and C (CVI LabWindows), deployed at companies in the Frosinone industrial district.

Owner

Self-employed programmer: Visual C++ quality control applications for SOGO SpA and a modem-based order-receiving system for SAEDI Srl, which later hired me.

Farmaclick

Communication protocol between pharmacies and pharmaceutical wholesalers: orders, real-time availability, returns, delivery notes, invoices and price lists, with multiple wholesalers at once. Open specifications, implemented by every Italian pharmacy management system and adopted by hundreds of distributors. I wrote the server implementation, which serves more than 22,000 pharmacies and about 7 million transactions a day.

ID

Pharmacy management system rethought from scratch, with on-premise, cloud and hybrid-cloud deployment. In hybrid mode, data is replicated to the cloud in real time, so the pharmacy keeps working through connectivity problems, hardware failures or malware attacks. Features later adopted by other systems include tracking of requested versus dispensed products integrated with pharmacy robots, and a privacy-preserving memory of each patient's preferred generic medicines.

DiFarmHUB

Integration platform that opens DiFarm, the wholesaler management system built on IBM i, to external systems through secure REST APIs, without rewriting the core system or exposing its databases. Cloud microservices architecture, centrally updated. In production: TsConnect 2.0 was the first application built entirely on it, and a wholesaler has used it to integrate its own AI solution.

IRISIn development

AI module for wholesalers' sales departments, built on DiFarmHUB. It analyses pricing, campaigns and customers and acts directly within the management system, instead of stopping at a dashboard.

ID MessagingPilot

Agentic system connecting WhatsApp to the ID pharmacy management system, currently piloted in a number of pharmacies.

Pharmaweb

B2B portal of the Italian pharmaceutical supply chain, built on the IOKO CMS developed by my team: more than 15,000 member pharmacies and over 6,000 weekly users.

Sapienza University of Rome

Discontinued to start my professional career in software development.

Liceo Classico "Dante Alighieri"