September 30, 2011
Samba, Soccer and Software!
When people think of Brazil, they often think of Carnival, Soccer, and Samba. While this is all fun and games, Brazil has become an important financial center in the Americas. It also hosts major players in the software industry. That’s why FairCom has maintained a long standing presence in Brazil. Indeed, São Paulo has been home to FairCom Brazil since 1997.
Brazil is a country of great diversity in many aspects. Being the 5th largest country by area in the world, and with the 7th largest economy, Brazil has become an important global player.
With the political and financial stability of recent years, there is a significant increase in consumer goods consumption and thus that sector now leads the ranking of the fastest growing companies in Brazil. And, Brazil is an important player in the worldwide software market. Being the 12th largest development market in the world, Brazil hosts many important companies in multiple software market sectors.
The recent cycle of economic development seen by Brazil is the result of an economic stabilization after many years of extremely high inflation rates. This stability, alongside with the promotion of large numbers of people to the middle class and the globalization of commodities, has contributed to the development of enterprises, especially those related to consumer goods.
During the 1980s, crushing inflation rates — more than 100% per month — suffocated economic growth. It was crucial for Brazilian financial institutions to innovate and create top rated banking automation solutions. As a result, Brazil has developed a strong banking and financial industry firmly based on IT. Indeed, 7 of the 10 largest Latin American banks are Brazilian, and from that same list, 5 of top 5 are Brazilian.
This financial industry depends on solid, high performance solutions. The credit card market, for instance, is growing by double digits over the last 15 years. In recent years, FairCom Brazil has worked closely with several large financial institutions throughout Brazil having fine tuned c‑tree databases to run up to 6 times faster than traditional relational databases, reaching throughputs on the order of thousands of transactions per second. In another success, FairCom Brazil enabled a Java application based on application servers to run much faster and use considerably less resources than one of the top RDMS of the market.
Another source also claims Brazil has become the third largest market for personal computers in the world, surpassing Japan, and behind only China and the U.S. This demonstrates the level of IT penetration of the market. Multinational companies clearly see the strategic presence they must have in Brazil.
FairCom sees vast growth potential for the foreseeable future in Brazil, and all of Latin America. Expect to see continued successes from this extremely important southern neighbor.