José Antonio López Chauvet
Vice-president for LATAM, Epicor
For Epicor, Mexico is the largest market within Latin American and makes up for about 80% of our regional revenue. A good share of our workforce is also located in Mexico and one of our headquarters for LATAM is in Monterrey, where we have about 800 employees, making it the largest office for Epicor worldwide. There is a lot of talent in Monterrey and labor is competitive. With our local development, support, finance, automotive, and H&R teams based here in Monterrey we serve not only LATAM but also the US and other parts of the world. We are seeing a great step forward in the automotive, metal mechanics, and plastic industries especially. Most importantly, we know that Industry 4.0 is not a one technology piece. In order to remain competitive, companies in Mexico are implementing IoT, mobile technology, AI, and more cognitive responsive machines, and that is where Epicor comes in. With our technology, we are giving more pieces of software and technology to our customers so that they can interact and extract that data from their ERP and connect to other machines so they can learn from them, their clients, and suppliers in terms of real data at the exact moment when they need it.
Axel Abulafia
Executive Vice President, Globant
We started Globant 16 years ago focusing on the US and Europe. Our first clients were in the US, especially in Silicon Valley, and we have worked with companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Electronic Arts for many years. Although people think we are in the software development industry, we like to think we are in the fitness industry, helping large organizations stay in great shape. In the last few years, we started to see many companies in Latin America that were eager to transform, pulling the customers to the center and interacting with the latest technologies and trends. This is what we do. We are organized in different units that we call studios, which is how we generate knowledge and capacity within Globant. From these 20 studios, we cover AI, mobile, big data, agile delivery, and more. One studio called “future of organizations” has applications on the cloud to help with digital transformation initiatives to deal mainly with corporate culture. A company’s culture and processes are more important than implementing technology, as technology will not change anything if people are not aligned or willing to change. Our teams are multidisciplinary. We put together a team of eight to 10 people from around the world from different studios to develop certain projects. We focus on the quality of our talent; a large portion of our growth is from repeat business from existing clients. EMC was our first client, and we still work for it. We enjoy building long-term relationships as it helps us grow and get referrals.
Gustavo Gómez
President & Director General, Gustavo Gómez
Mexico was one of the first countries in which HP established its presence as a company, giving us a presence of around 55 years in Mexico and Latin America. As such, we decided to leverage Mexico’s proximity to the US to start a manufacturing operation back in the 1980s, before slowly evolving our presence in Mexico into the distribution business for the entire Latin American region, not to mention North America, and become a more a service-centric operation. Mexico is one of the select business centers we have across the globe, in addition to others in Romania, India, Ireland, and China that provide 24/7 support to key business processes within the company. For example, in Mexico, we process payrolls for the entire company and customer orders for the entire American continent and still are a very important distribution hub for Latin America. This is an internal global business center, one of very few based in Guadalajara, where we have 3,500 employees, the average age of which is merely 28. We also have a nearly 50/50 split of female and male employees there. With frequent visits from our VPs, I am there nearly every month in order to ensure the company’s leadership is present. That being said, we also see that Jalisco is becoming a digital hub for the country.
Sergio Rosengaus
CEO, Kio Networks
Mexico has done an excellent job of trying to advance digitalization across the country. The private sector has done its part but so has the government by investing in infrastructure and awareness initiatives. Authorities are opening up their digital capital through open data initiatives and platforms such as gob.mx, which involves many governmental initiatives and large institutions. Mexico is on its way to becoming a reasonably digitalized country. There have been a number of policies that have created an excellent general framework for the country. Additionally, there are institutions and states that have their own initiatives and have invested even more in digitalization. Eventually, these areas will become flagship initiatives. Despite all these initiatives, substantial efforts need to be made in fintech and the government needs to address the issue of a large percentage of the population not having a bank account. Digitalizing SMEs has been a problem for all countries and companies. Even large companies like Microsoft and Google have had trouble helping SMEs become more digitalized. In Mexico, this segment is lagging in adopting digitalized processes, but this can be corrected through continuous commitment. We have a division focused only on SMEs that has nearly 80,000 clients—we know how to help them digest technology better. We have also found that many of these family-based SMEs are being driven toward digitalization by younger generations because they feel comfortable running everything on the cloud and using digital tools of all kinds.
Omar Díaz
Managing Director, Neoris Mexico
According to analysts, the Mexican market is the second largest in Latin America; the exact number may vary among IDC and GARTNER but it represents 20% to 23% of the IT services market in the region. For us, our Mexico operation is still the largest and key for our global growth strategy, because it provides the stability required to conquer new markets. Looking at IDC reports, the financial services industry accounts more than 20% of the IT services market in Mexico, closely followed by manufacturing, and then we have Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and retail. A fair estimation of the growth of IT spending in financial institutions is around 5%, mainly triggered by business intelligence, analytics and cyber security technologies. NEORIS’ digital offerings by industry include financial services, customer on-boarding, Customer 360, manufacturing, digital worker; Predictive Maintenance (PdM), CPG, and mobile solutions based on user experience (UX) technology. Digital transformation is a reality. A recent study from Gartner reveals that nearly 70% of the companies in Latin America have started designing a digital strategy. Talking about the differences between countries in our region, I would say that the maturity level is the starting point. We have a clearly defined digital transformation practice that acts depending on that maturity level; sometimes we need to start from a basic promotion of digital culture, but in other cases the client has already taken a path to digital transformation.
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