Dr. Alper Özbilen: Shaping the Future of Technology with his Unwavering Dedication and Innovative Spirit
With over two decades of combined academic and industrial experience in computer networks and information security, Dr. Alper Özbilen stands at the forefront of technological innovation. A distinguished alumnus of Gazi University, Ankara, where he earned his Ph.D. in June 2012, Dr. Özbilen has since channeled his expertise into leading Pavotek Inc., an Istanbul-based powerhouse in electronics and software development, as its Chairman.
Under his visionary leadership, Pavo Group has carved a niche in the competitive tech landscape, championing cutting-edge solutions and strategic advancements. Dr. Özbilen’s commitment to excellence is not just limited to his corporate endeavors; he is also a thought leader, penning insightful articles on organizational justice and beyond.
The Initial Years
Dr. Özbilen started his career as an electrical-electronics engineer and completed his MBA program on technology and innovation in Boston University, He has worked in the field of ICT (Information and Communication Technology), particularly artificial intelligence and big data analytics, and gained expertise in these areas with a focus on defense and public security.
Dr. Özbilen believes that career choices are often a reflection of people’s personality traits. From this perspective, the personality dynamics are the main reasons that led him to this sector and engineering. For example, solution orientation is a characteristic that affects his entire life, from his communication with people to his route determination style on vacation. This is how he was drawn to the discipline of engineering, where mathematics and science are reflected in the practical world in a way that is beneficial to human life, and where the solution is the main element in general.
“I accept it as a permanent obligation to adopt yesterday as an accumulation and to be aware of today in order to guide tomorrow; to always approach innovations and changes consciously. For this reason, I can say that most of the principles that make up me actually motivate me,” he explains.
A Transformative Association
Professional business life is about taking the risk of going ahead rather than being ahead of others. Dr. Özbilen has observed and continues to observe this wherever he has been throughout his professional life.
Before 2018, Pavotek had significant capabilities in communication and embedded software and became an important partner in the Turkish local industry. Until 2018, its activities were not oriented towards the global market. Mostly, it was focused on critical subsystems, design, and production rather than final products and solutions. With Alper Özbilen, after 2018, the story of Pavotek started to become a company with independent solutions and products, primarily targeting the international market. After this date, Pavotek’s transformation into Pavo Group, which represents a group of companies, accelerated.
After taking over as the Chairman of the Board of Directors, Dr. Özbilen started the structuring process that he deemed necessary to expand Pavo Group’s areas of expertise and to offer advanced expertise as solutions created entirely in line with the needs and expectations of customers.
“While promoting a culture based on innovation, agility, and expertise throughout Pavo Group, I set the main goal of bringing together future technologies, especially artificial intelligence applications, with our established R&D and production culture. I saw it as a top priority to establish an international team and expand international collaborations in order to expand and strengthen Pavo Group’s expertise in the global market,” he shares.
Guided by his vision and the hard work of his team members, today Pavo Group has become a global technology provider with representatives in more than 10 world cities in Asia, the Gulf, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and its solutions are available in 17 countries.
The Company
Pavo Group offers its solutions to the global market with advanced ICT products in e-government, homeland security, public safety, and telecommunications sectors. The expertise of 12 business units operating within Pavo Group in different fields increases Pavo Group’s coverage in cutting-edge technologies. On the other hand, the group sees it as a fundamental priority to create collaborations with different companies in the global market with its program called Pavo Alliance.
The Group does not follow sales trends that focus on marketing clichés and short-term financial gains. They are aware of the importance of their fields of activity such as border security, facility security, cyber operations center (SOC), cryptography, data analytics, artificial intelligence solutions, and communication equipment for the private companies that make up their partners. They focus on the exact and unique needs of their customers in their fields of activity. The management believes that an approach that does not impose what it has on its customers as a need but tries to understand what its customers really need and finds solutions for it, will be successful in the long run.
“We are already agile and have been able to customize our solutions to meet the different environmental conditions, security challenges, and demands of our partners around the world. I consider this experience and our business culture to be the key differentiators that differentiate Pavo Group from its competitors,” says Dr. Özbilen.
Driving Growth & Innovation
Being a fair, decisive, and harmonious manager while considering innovation, expertise, and agility as the main goals are the elements that form the basis of Dr. Özbilen’s management approach.
Adopting an approach focused on pleasing everyone is one of the biggest mistakes an organization can make. Treating everyone equally is not the exact equivalent of practicing justice and will inevitably lead to failure. An understanding of justice that prioritizes accumulation, effort, and value creation is the key to productive outcomes, he opines.
Sustainable success is largely the result of sticking to strategic and long-term plans and being decisive. Relying on quick decisions and instant gains has a dopamine effect. This addiction is not a source of healthy returns. Correct analysis, acting in accordance with the company culture, and making decisions without compromising foresight are also guarantees of the efforts and time spent.
“I believe in the transformative power of activities that are not afraid to take action in line with consciously established strategic goals. While managing Pavo Group with this understanding, I aim to create a transformative impact not only for Pavo Group but also for the global technology ecosystem. With this understanding, I am determined to support the construction of a new and qualified path against a few global technology giants that dominate the global market with their monopolistic policies. I think it is possible to move from a market based on digital exploitation and dependencies to a market based on connectivity,” he shares.
Challenges and the Learning Mindset
Like everywhere in life, there are problems in business. It is the nature of existence. From the right perspective, problems are a guide to understanding the current state of the company. Dr. Özbilen believes that the problem for an organization is that the problems never change. If problems are solved over time and replaced by other, perhaps more sophisticated problems, then you are on the right track.
In light of all this, another thing that his leadership journey has taught him is that wherever there are people, the dynamics are always subject to change. All of the principles we adopt are evolving with a new situation we learn every day. “Not missing the change, avoiding rote memorization, and continuing the journey by thinking that you are part of a mission focused on producing value brings with it a permanent gain,” he says.
Recalling a particularly challenging time, Dr. Özbilen shares that on his return to Türkiye from the US, he was offered to head a department tasked with protecting the personal data of the society – guaranteed by the constitution and laws – and detecting organized crimes against the society. Here, however, a narrow group of interests was conducting in secrecy practices that compromised and abused the data and information security of the entire society.
This system, was extremely complex, far from accountability, where only a partial record of the work and transactions was kept, and where multiple backdoors were created secretly and purposefully; Authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), the most basic needs and main framework of information security, was deliberately designed in a fiction that was completely distant. The vast majority of the nearly one hundred people assigned to this department were technical personnel recruited by the same interest group.
What was expected of Dr. Özbilen was to reorganize the system in accordance with its legally defined purpose and to reconstruct it in such a way that it would not be subject to any abuse. In doing so, the security functions necessary for public safety were not to be interrupted.
Dr. Özbilen’s biggest challenge was to restore a system that was built entirely on exploitation to a new form that could not be exploited in any way and to do so without stopping services that would enable law enforcement. This was an extremely challenging, near impossible task, like replacing critical system components of an airplane that are not working or only working. Troubleshooting requires skill. Troubleshooting a malfunction in the air is either impossible or requires you to take enormous risks to land safely on the ground, perform the necessary maintenance with great speed, and take off again.
“Although more than ten years have passed, when I think about the risk I took and the result I realized, I cannot give a definite answer as to whether I could do the same thing today as a more experienced person. The first answer I give to those who ask me what my success was that day is that the secret to doing the right job in the right way and on time is to find the right people and quickly build your team,” he remembers.
Dr. Özbilen’s biggest takeaway from this experience is to be aware of the extraordinary power that dedication to doing the right job in the right way – the most fundamental element of sustainable success – gives you to overcome any obstacle.
Being Agile for the Emerging Trends
As a Group, Pavo is in a process of continuous learning and adaptation in order to keep pace with the constant change, competition, and demands in the sectors in which it operates. This means both continuously monitoring trends in the market and assessing their impact on its business model. The Group is developing strategies focused on sustainability and scalability in all our business lines.
For example, owing to the investments it made in the field of cryptography in 2019, leaving aside the expectations of quick profits, today the Group has achieved critical capabilities that differentiate it from its competitors in the market with its crypto devices and crypto solutions. “In the future, I believe that civilian and military applications of cryptography will re-establish known assumptions,” adds Dr. Özbilen.
Keeping abreast of changes in the industry and understanding the evolving demands of the modern consumer is vital to sustain and drive the growth of the organization. To achieve this, Pavo Group takes a multi-pronged approach. First, it invests significantly in R&D and strives to stay at the forefront of technological advances and industry trends by maintaining close relationships with industry leaders and academic institutions. Through continuous training and competency development programs, the company keeps the knowledge and skills of its employees up to date so that they can keep pace with these changes. It also gains deep user insights through its field studies, and analysis by our regional team members and local consultants.
“We build a unique relationship with our clients based on mutual trust through collaborative approaches that can reach different dimensions such as technology transfer. As a result of this relationship, we witness that the institutions and organizations that we start to offer our solutions reach us with different demands before our teams start a new business development activity. All this process ensures that the rapid growth of Pavo Group is sustainable,” shares Dr. Özbilen.
Expanding Horizons
Dr. Özbilen’s expectations for himself and his team for the coming years are primarily to continue to expand internationally. “Maintaining our roots in the current regions where we operate is also among my expectations. In addition, focusing on the application of the technologies produced by our company in different fields is one of my future goals. Strengthening our relationship of mutual interest and respect with our partners in the market is also one of my priorities for the future,” concludes Dr. Özbilen.
The following sections need to be designed on the PDF:
Advise for Aspiring Entrepreneurs:
Dr. Özbilen advises would-be entrepreneurs to be courageous, to have the capacity to take risks, but not to give up being rational. Remaking something requires both romanticism and rationalism. What will make the real difference here is to understand the market, dynamics, trends, and change correctly and to put original and authentic ideas on it.
“Mistakes should not be discouraged, but fatal mistakes should be avoided. Here I would like to refer to Edison’s quote ” I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” You can make many mistakes until you find the right one, but it will be those mistakes that will lead you to the right one.”
A Quote to Live By:
Mevlana Celallettin Rumi’s quote centuries ago, “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” has been a reference for me in my leadership journey. While trying to solve the challenges and problems I face as a manager, I started to review my own behaviors and attitudes first, rather than external factors. This self-awareness process helped me better understand my strengths and weaknesses and helped me use this knowledge to improve both myself and the team I lead.
Rumi’s quote tells us to adopt a leadership approach from the inside out. The changes we make in our inner world directly affect our management style, decision-making processes, and communication skills. These internal changes spread outward, positively affecting team dynamics, collaboration, and overall business performance. Rumi’s teachings and philosophy, which have become more and more appreciated over the centuries, continue to be a constant source of guidance and inspiration in my management career.
“Our journey of global growth continues every year, touching new customers in new countries.”
“We reject dependency-based relationships with our customers and stakeholders and prefer royalty and commitment-based relationships.”
Mizanpaja uygun pdf’ini göndersinler. Biz de çoğaltalım. Dergi mizanpajında yalnızca bizimle ilgili haberi. PDF olarak dağpıtırız hem de baskı haline getiririz.