Application Integration in Latin America
I’ve worked in the Latin American markets for many years now, and I have to say it is a difficult market to penetrate for IT vendors. The biggest competition for software vendors is not other vendors, but custom code. Salaries for developers and engineers are very low compared to U.S. salaries, sort of akin to the salaries of Indian engineers which has enabled the explosive growth of outsourced development. So it’s been a pleasant surprise to see that companies in Mexico and Brazil have really taken to the concept of an integration application.
However, there are peculiarities of selling into the Latin American marketplace that I’ve had to learn in order to be successful. I’ve been advised by my system integrator in Mexico that you can’t say your integration platform helps companies “save on development costs,” because development costs are so low anyway. You’ve got to sell them on the time aspect, how an integration platform will enable a company to configure a new integration on-the-fly, or how an integration platform can enable a company to create repeatable and documentable processes that won’t walk out the door with developers who quit.
Another aspect of selling in Latin America, which actually makes an integration platform a more compelling value proposition south of the border than in the U.S., is the IT and application environment of mid-sized companies. Case-in-point, in working with a Mexican Business Intelligence vendor (there are a whole crop of home-grown ISVs in Mexico and Brazil that I’ve discovered), I’ve learned that in the Mexican manufacturing sector, in areas outside of Mexico City, many companies have older versions of Oracle or SAP and have not kept up with their maintenance and support. Despite the fact that both Oracle and SAP have their own ETL tools that they practically give away, these older versions don’t, presenting a quagmire to the Business Intelligence company: their product works on top of a data mart or data warehouse, but these companies have no way, save custom code, to build data marts or data warehouses. An integration tool will enable them to increase their potential market size and go after the mid-market, which in Mexico is ripe for the picking!