Luis Guillermo Campos
Site Manager, Tek Experts
Tek Experts started almost seven years ago in Sofia, Bulgaria; the Costa Rica office was set up six years ago. It started off slow in the beginning because we had to establish the operation and ramp up the team. However, the company rapidly grew to 200 people by the time I joined Tek Experts in January 2014. Since then, the number of employees has grown to 750 today. Since December 2016, we have been recruiting 45-50 people per month. We are close to 1,700 people globally, and Costa Rica is our largest operation, both employee-wise and in terms of business volume. We manage more than 40% of our global cases, and all done by Costa Rican staff. Our services started with software support at a technical level. We interacted mainly with IT departments and people that handled apps, not users. However, we have evolved since then. Even though our core business is still B2B corporate software support, we have also implemented professional services, customer services, account management, pre-sales, and software configuration.
Julio Castilla
President, Grupo CMA
Our main partners are HP Inc., Microsoft, and Zebra, and our vision is to be our customers’ trusted IT advisor. We do hardware, software, services, and outsourcing, where we have 80 people. Five years ago, we also got into the cloud business with the Codisa Data Center. For 25 years, CMA was a hardware-oriented company, after which we decided to become a service-oriented company. Traditionally, about 80% of our business was in hardware and 20% in services. Services now make up 60% of our total business, and just 40% hardware. We are a recognized cloud provider in the region, winning the award for Best Cloud in Latin America in Las Vegas in 2016. So we are leading the cloud wave with Codisa, while also selling infrastructure to our main customers, including big government entities. About 40% of our sales are to the public sector, the remaining 60% to the private sector and finance.
Guido Goicochea
Founder & CEO, Guido Goicochea
We are a 15-year-old company that represents SAP with a local presence in five countries: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico. We do software development for three vertical industries and export our software to over 15 countries in South America, Central America, the Caribbean, as well as the Middle East. We have over 500 customers mainly throughout Latin America with our vertical solutions through SAP. I have been a member of the Global Partner Executive Council since 2013. I am one of the 10 partners around the world who is a member of the advisory council to SAP. Costa Rica is a great place to do business even though the country is small. Doing business in Latin America is somewhat difficult compared to the US and Europe; in Latin America everyone wants their own system, implementation, pace, and flavor. Standard implementations do not work as easily as they do in larger and more sophisticated countries that adopt best practices.
Ariel Vargas
Director & General Manager, VMware
Something that VMware has specifically identified in Costa Rica is its talent. The Costa Rican has no fear to challenge the status quo, which is important for us. The other important aspect is its “pura vida“ culture, which has something energetic and full of collaboration and participation between people. These are some of the reasons VMware got to know Costa Rica beyond the standard reasons regarding its location within the Americas, proximity to the US, and base for off-shore operations, etc. It is easy to sell the concept of talent here; the moment people step off the plane, they realize the benefit of Costa Rican culture and what people do. Employee motivation is also important, and productivity is measured depending on what role an employee has. Many of our roles are based on deliverables, on which we measure productivity through several successful metrics.
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