Technology Executive
Nikola Kovačević.
I build technology organizations that hold up when pressure hits. This is what I do for work. It is also what I do for fun.
I spend most of my time in regulated enterprises. Pharmaceuticals. Manufacturing. Medical devices. The kind of places where a failed deployment does not mean an annoyed tweet. It means a factory line stops, or a patient waits longer for medicine. I specialize in the transitions other people avoid. Carve-outs, for one. Cloud migrations. Identity separation too, if the scale is high enough to be interesting. If that sounds like your world, we should compare notes.
Leading an enterprise carve-out at scale
When Sanofi spun out Opella as a standalone company, I was tasked with isolating the entire infrastructure estate: 53+ manufacturing and commercial sites, 16,000 users, and hundreds of applications across four cloud landing zones. The business could not afford downtime. Regulators could not afford gaps. And the timeline was non-negotiable.
I built the migration governance framework, isolated Opella infrastructure from Sanofi, and led the identity migration to Azure AD with SCIM provisioning. The result: zero business-disrupting incidents. Risk dropped 70%. Annual run costs fell by EUR 1.5M after cloud rationalization.
This is the work I do best: taking messy, high-stakes technology transitions and making them predictable.
EUR 1.5M
annual infrastructure cost reduction
53+
sites isolated with zero downtime
16,000
users migrated to standalone Azure AD with phishing-resistant MFA and Conditional Access
70%
risk reduction on carve-out deliverables
Key Initiatives
Full career →Sanofi Digital Factory 4.0
Dec 2021Built the Web Application Platform for Sanofi's smart factory. Delivered batch genealogy, control tower, and observability.
36,000 hours saved annually
Opella Infrastructure Carve-Out
Jun 2025Ran the infrastructure separation for Opella's spin-off. 53 sites across four Azure zones. Zero business disruption.
EUR 1.5M saved, zero downtime
Opella Identity Carve-Out
Mar 2026Delivered a new identity foundation for Opella. Migrated 16,000 users to standalone Azure AD with phishing-resistant MFA, Conditional Access, and CyberARK Just-In-Time access.
16,000 users, zero downtime
How I lead
I build teams that outlast me
I hire people who are better than me at specific things, then I get out of their way. I built an agentic AI coding platform for 200+ developers and moved to infrastructure-as-code, cutting provisioning time by 85%.
Engineering metrics should map to business outcomes, not vanity dashboards.
A pretty chart is useless if it does not change what the business decides. I cut infrastructure costs by 50% while improving operational reliability by 20% because the metrics were tied to actual decisions.
I make the complex predictable.
Regulated enterprises have constraints most startups do not. GxP, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, EU MDR, pharmaceutical serialization, NIS2. If you know what these mean, you know why predictability matters.
Let's talk.
I speak at conferences about infrastructure, carve-outs, and building teams under pressure. If you are organizing an event, I would love to hear about it.
Navigating a technology transition and want to compare notes? I am happy to do that too.
I typically respond within 24 hours. Initial conversations are informal and confidential.