Loading ...A CTO-at-heart COO
Following one of his inherently programmed career principles—get to know how things work and don’t stop until you do—is Chito Bustamante’s key to success.
Currently the chief operating officer (COO) of Chikka Asia Inc., Bustamante jump-started his career even before completing his college degree. “I entered UP Diliman but moved back to the US in 1988 to continue school. I tried business administration and education, among others. I didn’t finish and started working full-time,” he says.
However, he did not let an unfinished degree hinder him from shooting for the stars. Bustamante has come a long way from working in a consumer electronics retail outlet in the US and moonlighting as a banquet waiter.
A classic example of a graduate of the school of hard knocks, Bustamante worked various jobs holding different positions. He has worked in the fast-food, retail, and automobile detailing industries. As his career advanced and as he moved up the corporate ladder, he realized that his calling was in the IT industry—where he has been working for 15 years now.
“I was an accountant for IBM professional services division, and a systems engineer working on site for Cisco,” he recalls. “Before going back to the Philippines in 2000, I was a systems engineer for Compucom Systems in California.”
Bustamante first learned about Chikka when it was still in its infancy years. When the founders of Chikka began toying with the idea of a messaging solution that would best serve the needs of Filipinos online and their contacts in the Philippines, they talked to Bustamante—then an engineer at Silicon Valley in late 1999.
Chikka’s founders regularly consulted him on both the business and technical viabilities of the project—an undertaking that became more ambitious as the group, as early as 2000, had to deal with rapidly growing volumes of text messages.
The COO recalls that the whole staff was working under a lot of stress because Chikka was launching a pioneering application—the world’s first mobile instant messaging (IM) service to run on short messaging system (SMS).
“We all pitched in to inspire and to motivate. In 2002, I was called to become COO of Chikka. The company was celebrating its first year of commercial launch and already had entered a frenetic product development phase, as Philippine network operators were encouraging experimentation and spawning a whole industry,” Bustamante recalls.
Chikka told Bustamante that they wanted a COO who was a chief technology officer (CTO) at heart. “Chikka was still a very young, small and flat organization then so I would be hands-on in managing the engineers and continuously deliberating the best technical solutions for the various mobile messaging applications being released,” he notes.
It was Bustamante who christened the mobile messenger Chikka—Filipino slang for “small talk” which appropriately describes the nature of the billions of text messages now being exchanged all over the world.
When asked what the most exciting part of being the company’s COO is, Bustamante says that together with the rest of the management, it is championing Chikka’s innovative spirit and culture even to the extent of disposing its established products if they need to be changed.
“I just feel like everyday is a different day at Chikka,” he points out. “There’s such excitement about products that hold great potential. The most challenging task for me is coming up with more ways for our subscribers to embrace the mobile way of life and managing all the other countries we are currently in with as much efficiency as we do locally or regionally.”
By April Rojales
Computerworld Philippines
Published in the March 2007 print edition of Computerworld Philippines
July 18, 2007
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