Brazil IT Conference Examines Transformative Role of Largest Market in LatAm

By Filipe Pacheco

For a long time, Brazil was supposed to be “The Country of the Future” — or “o país do futuro,” as Brazilians have been saying for the past few decades. It is hard to be certain if the country is truly ending into this truly transformative stage – but clearly the information technology industry is playing a huge role in accelerating the changing perception of the largest economy in Latin America. The powerful role of Brazil’s IT is the focus of the Global IT Forum – one of the region’s most prestigious Outsourcing conferences – hosted by Brasscom, the Brazilian Association of Information Technology and Communication Companies, here in São Paulo, later this week.

The event is happening in conjunction with The Economist magazine’s Brazil Summit. The purpose of the summit is not to think of Brazil just as it is today, but to look at how it will be in the near future — or in 2022, more specifically — focusing on the country’s long-term ambitions and whether it will succeed in tackling some of its biggest challenges.

Today Brazil already is the 7th largest economy in the world, and 1st in Latin America, and in the next decade, it is expected to become the 5th largest economy in the world. In 2010, the Brazilian IT-BPO sector turned over US$85.1 billion, up 44% from 2008.

The IT portion of the event will focus on five main topics:

• the profile of the Brazilian IT market, based on the latest research

• the industry’s leading sectors, including financial services, oil & gas, telecom, manufacturing, retail, and e-government

• Brazil as an IT sourcing destination

• case studies of leading Brazilian and international IT providers and their solutions

• market opportunities and possible actions by the public and private sectors to tackle the sector challenges

On first day of the program, Fabio Giambiagi, chief of market risk department at BNDES and deputy member of the Bank for the Interamerican Development (BID), is scheduled to talk about the proposals for a better Brazil in 2022, the year that marks the country’s independence Bicentennial.

The agenda also includes a panel on “Asset and Credit Bubbles?” with Mauro Leos, VP and senior credit officer for the sovereign risk group at Moody’s Analytics; Javier Estrada, professor at IESE; and Robert Ward, director of country publishing at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

To talk about “the cities of the future,” the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, the city expected to experience the country’s biggest growth in Brazil in the coming years, will debate the urban challenges ahead with Guruduth Banavar, chief technology officer in the global sector at IBM, and Tom Standage, Digital Editor at The Economist.

The afternoon is slated to feature Virgílio Almeida, information technology policy secretary, Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation, in conversation with Antonio Gil, president of Brasscom. Mauro Peres, country manager, IDC, will serve as moderator.

IT will be even more in the spotlight on the second day of the forum, starting with an Experts Panel that will gather Cassio Dreyfuss, VP of research at Gartner; Michael Corbett, chairman of IAOP; David Tapper, VP of outsourcing and offshore services market research at IDC; and Atul Vashistha, chairman and CEO of Neo Group. This panel will be moderated by Kirk Laughlin, founder and editorial director of Nearshore Americas (sister publication of Sourcing Brazil).

Two of the biggest problems in Brazil today — the shortage of qualified workforce and the relatively high costs of labor — will be the focus of a panel with Erwin Rezelman, president of SAP Labs Latin America, and Guilherme Plonksi, president of ANPROTEC.

You can find the complete agenda here.

The Brasscom Global IT Forum is an invitation-only event. If you are interested in attending, start here.

This article originally appeared on Sourcing Brazil