Before Somusar, Francesco contributed to the design of Java-based legacy integration and EAI solutions for major Sun Microsystems's customers in Italy, most notably in the Telco and Public Healthcare sectors. As an independent consultant, he had also previously been involved by Etnoteam in Milan, Italy, as a project manager in European R&D projects in the field of Internet-enabled embedded systems and real-time operating systems, as well as in custom business application development projects.

Prior to his consultancy work, Francesco worked between 1992 and 1997 at iXOS Software in Munich, Germany, where he developed or co-developed client-server applications on Windows/Unix, original fuzzy algorithms for dynamic fault imaging tools applied in the microprocessor industry, and early prototypes of Internet-oriented video-surveillance systems.

In 1989 Francesco joined the Open Software Foundation in Munich, where he was involved in the development of OSF/1 and OSF/DCE. Prior to OSF, Francesco worked for seven years at Etnoteam as a system programmer on Unix, MS-DOS, and VMS.

Francesco received a Laureate degree in "Scienze dell'Informazione" (Information Science) from the University of Milan in 1986.