Eighteen internet providers can buy a great deal of fibre. They can also accumulate an impressive collection of ways to do the same job. A customer calls. A technician is dispatched. A bill arrives. Multiply those ordinary events across acquired businesses, separate systems and regional brands, and the organisation begins to resemble a drawer full of charging cables: everything ought to connect, though finding the right end takes patience.
This was the practical territory Denis Ferreira entered at the business that would become Alares Internet. He became CEO in January 2022. By November, Grupo Conexão was adopting a new name, bringing a collection of regional operations into a shared public identity. Ferreira’s assignment reached well beyond the lettering on the shops.
His career offers a way into a less photographed part of the acquisition business. There is the moment when companies agree to combine. Then there are all the mornings when their employees have to make the combination work. Ferreira has spent much of his public life at Alares discussing the second part.
Eighteen providers, one promise
The new name contained a small flight of fancy. Alares brought together Portuguese references to wings and homes. Its promise was to give people the connection to go further. At launch in November 2022, the operator already served more than 500,000 homes and businesses in six Brazilian states, assembled through the acquisition and integration of 18 providers.
Outcenter, Conexão, Cabo Telecom, Multiplay, Starweb, Webnet and Waynet were among the names in that history. Grain Management had become the controlling shareholder in 2021. The challenge for Ferreira was to give the combined business a common direction while continuing to sell and deliver a service experienced locally, one connection at a time.
The organisational tidying was substantial. The company’s 2022 results described a simplified product portfolio and a reduction from 16 legal entities in January to four at year-end. The same report linked the changes to operational efficiency and the integration of acquired businesses. A winged name had arrived with a distinctly earthbound to-do list.
November 2022 Alares launch
In May 2023, he marked the migration of Cabo Telecom, the last commercial brand then still operating under its original name. His announcement credited Alejandro Contreras and Mônica Langkammer Martins for the branding project. The gesture put colleagues’ names into a story otherwise easily told entirely through corporate names.
A computer scientist in the commercial seat
Ferreira’s education began on the technical side: a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of São Paulo’s São Carlos campus. Business education followed through FGV’s CEAG programme and an MBA at SDA Bocconi in Milan. The combination spans the machinery of an operation and the economics that decide whether it can keep running.
His early career was in management consulting, with Accenture, Gemini Consulting and Siemens Telecommunications. He subsequently held leadership roles at Vivo, GVT and Claro. Before Alares, he led Residential Solutions at TIM Brasil, working with TIM Live, the fixed-broadband business.
That TIM role covered marketing, sales, operations, finance and planning. These are the departments that can produce five entirely reasonable answers to one question about a customer. His account of the job emphasises the growth achieved with his team. It also helps explain the breadth of the integration problem he later took on: a broadband operator has to coordinate commercial promises with physical delivery and financial limits.
The customer he would rather not win
In a business that counts subscribers, declining to chase every possible subscriber requires an explanation. Ferreira has been willing to give one. During a 2023 interview, he put the pricing position plainly: A gente não entra em guerra de preço.
We do not enter a price war.
The reasoning involved the investment required to put fibre into a customer’s home. By February 2024, he was also acknowledging the consequence: the decision to prioritise value had affected organic additions. The company had seen modest growth on that measure in 2023, apart from customers gained through Webby.
He described revising the portfolio, tailoring offers to local competitive conditions and adding services such as streaming. The choices placed revenue and profitability alongside volume. There is a useful bluntness in his formulation: Não queremos trazer cliente por trazer.
He did not want to add a customer simply for the sake of adding one.
“Não queremos trazer cliente por trazer.”
Denis Ferreira, February 2024
“We don’t want to add customers just for the sake of it.”
That position sets up a continuing test for his leadership. A customer asked to value the service has to receive something worth valuing. Price discipline brings the conversation back to installations, reliability and the experience of getting help.
The map gets denser
Acquisitions changed the map. Webby brought 115,000 subscribers and new territory in 2023. By October that year, Alares was reporting 627,000 customers across seven states, including Paraná, with a backbone of 25,400 kilometres. The business had 2,300 employees and 90 company-owned stores.
Ferreira’s later description of growth was selective about geography. In May 2025, he favoured increasing capacity in places Alares already served, alongside buying providers with suitable networks and room to grow. Building a fresh network in an unfamiliar city was, he said at the time, less viable than those alternatives.
That approach makes the existing map valuable in a second way. It shows where the operator might serve more people using infrastructure and local knowledge already in place. Acquisition targets were assessed for revenue potential, network quality and governance. The appeal of a new asset depended partly on what Alares could do with it after taking ownership.
Business customers offered another route. By June 2024, Ferreira was describing Alares Empresas as a major growth opportunity, supported by investment in products, processes, training and staff. The network could reach small businesses, larger organisations and governments seeking connectivity and automation. Residential broadband remained central, while the same geographic reach could support a wider commercial offer.
An algorithm meets a telephone pole
The integration work acquired another purpose when Alares began expanding its use of artificial intelligence. In May 2025, Ferreira and CIO Miguel Alcantara described 15 initiatives under way. One application checked photographs taken by field workers against the company’s parameters for installations on poles and at the entrance to customers’ homes.
It is a pleasingly concrete example in a field fond of abstraction. There is a pole, a photograph and a job that needs checking. The company was also piloting checks inside the home, where router placement and interference made the task more complicated.
Another application analysed recorded customer-service interactions to help identify concentrations of problems by time or region. Ferreira connected the speed of these projects to the recent reorganisation of systems. Bringing acquired businesses onto a common architecture had made further work easier to execute.
His technology agenda also extended into business services. By October 2025, he was discussing security, monitoring, automation and smart-city opportunities strengthened by the Azza acquisition. These ambitions came with familiar physical constraints: investment decisions, the cost of using poles and the work of operating a network. Software still needed somewhere to hang its cable.
What happens after the handshake
When Alares completed the Azza purchase in 2024, Ferreira described integration across people, systems, processes, products and brand. He explicitly emphasised respecting people and making use of the talent arriving with the acquired company. In his account, a successful transition depended on the employees who would carry it out.
His 2026 writing gave that position a broader framework: financial discipline, customer trust, dependable infrastructure and organisational culture. He argued for attention to investment after operating earnings, clear delivery of the promised service, and training and recognition throughout the company. These were management priorities he set out publicly, with culture treated as a continuing leadership responsibility as the organisation expanded.
That emphasis appears in less financial settings too. At the company’s 2026 convention, Ferreira described recognising employees alongside reviewing results and setting the next year’s tactics. He thanked the executive team by name. The event tied strategy to incentive campaigns and the people expected to deliver it, with a football theme for a year of international competition.
His message in the company’s code of conduct makes another public commitment: integrity, respect and clear rules. Such statements are easy to place in a document. Their relevance to this particular business is practical. Employees joining through different acquisitions need to understand the expectations of the organisation they now share. Ferreira puts responsibility for that conduct across the company, including its leadership.
The IPNET transition supplied another chapter in May 2026. Alares announced the acquired operation’s brand migration after operational integration, describing the name change as the final step. The sequence matters: customers were already being served through the combined infrastructure before the sign changed.
Company footprint reported for Q2 2026. Figures describe Alares, rather than Ferreira’s personal assets or achievements.
Second-quarter 2026 reporting put net revenue at R$252.5 million, up 9.4% year on year. It also described a signed agreement to buy Oquei Telecom, then subject to approvals and contractual conditions. That prospective transaction would take the integration assignment into another part of São Paulo state.
Ferreira’s story keeps returning to this interval between agreement and experience. A larger company can be announced in an afternoon. Making its people, networks and systems work together occupies considerably more of the calendar. Somewhere at the end of that effort is a customer who simply wants the connection to work, with no particular interest in how many companies it took.