David Tapper, from industry analyst group IDC, knows the outsourcing marketplace inside out. His own take on the strategy being outlined for Brazil at the Brasscom Global IT Forum was that most in the industry are being too short-sighted and focused on business models that used to work – not the business models of the future.
“Brazil is following a path that could create a lot of revenue, but with the continued shift towards the cloud, business models will have to change. In the next five years you won’t feel the substitution, but it will happen eventually… just like the mainframe companies were competing with the PC companies – it took a while to understand the market change, but it happened,” he said.
Tapper believes that IT companies and the government in Brazil need to look one or two decades into the future if they are to plan effectively for the industry as a whole.
“There are plenty of systems integrators in the US, you can choose from any of them – the game has been won. The next generation of IT is the Googles, the Amazons, and the new names that will come along. That’s the future,” he added.
What Tapper is really saying is ‘don’t just try to emulate the success of India’, a market that grew thanks to low-cost offshore systems integration, testing, and software development. He believes that for Brazil to really succeed in IT, the industry should define their own rules and plan for the future.
Will anyone listen?
Photo by Jenn Forman Orth licensed under Creative Commons.
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