By Filipe Pacheco

Cross with clouds, Minais Gerais state, Brazil. Photo by Adam Jones | adamjones.freeservers.com.

“MEIO DE CAMPO.” This expression means a lot to many Brazilians. Literally translated to English as “middle field,” it comes from the world of soccer, and refers to the alignment of conditions for a player to go from defense to a forward position on the field and head toward the goal. In the business world, it has a similar meaning: to establish an environment for a company to go from its current position to another more prominent or strategic point in its field.

Go2neXt is a recently born Brazilian company that was conceived to take the “meio de campo” of the IT business in Brazil. Paulo Pichini, the CEO of the company, who has more than two decades of experience in the technology field, founded Go2neXt in October. Besides providing the usual consulting and infrastructure services, the goal is to help organizations make the transition from a traditional systems environment to a model based on cloud computing.

“In English the most used term would be a ‘cloud facilitator,’” Pichini says, “but the translation to Portuguese doesn’t sound right. So we prefer to refer to ourselves as ‘cloud angels’…. We transform the IT environment of a company to fit the cloud.”

For that, the company has created its own operation center, called C-NOC (Cloud Network Operation Center), which is monitored 24/7. It prepares clients for making use of a public cloud or private cloud, or also the hybrid approach.

Go2NeXt has established a chain of contributors to provide the services to its clients. Those contributing providers include Alog, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Fluke Networks, Jamcracker, Microsoft, UOL, VCE, VMware, and Westcon, among others. With those companies, Go2NeXt works on an alliance basis.

Even though Pichini started the company with the intention of helping clients make the transition to cloud services, Go2NeXt also provides “traditional services” of hardware/software solutions, as well as managed services (or SaaS). “We believe that, at the beginning, 40% of our revenues will come from traditional services; 40% from managed services and projects, and finally 20% from cloud integration,” Pichini told Sourcing Brazil.

After starting his career working in the IT segment of a major Brazilian bank, Pichini opened his own IT services business in 1992, which was bought by a Dutch company in 2000. Five years later, he became the manager of that group for Latin America, always having the Brazilian market as its main goal. In 2009, that firm’s strategic planners in Holland “left the region aside,” and in 2010 he left that company aside.

“We can notice a clear change of mentality by Brazilian CIOs in the past five, six years,” he says. “They are a lot less conservative than they used to be, especially considering the American market as a point of reference. We were much more conservative and averse to innovation. Now that is not true.”

According to Pichini, the demand for advanced and innovative tech services is growing so quickly in Brazil and outpacing supply that he knew it was the right time to open a business focused mainly on providing “transitional ambiance.”

To strengthen its position in the market, Go2NeXt recently purchased Cynett Teleinformática, a national company with more than 15 years of experience in IT and communications infrastructure, and responsible for projects for big domestic and foreign players, such as Ambev, Unilever, and British Telecom. With the Cynett deal, Go2neXt inherited operations in Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, and other areas in the state of São Paulo. They do not have American clients so far, but Pichini does not exclude that possibility.

He mentions new contracts the company signed with two “big players” in the domestic market: “one is a big telecommunications operator and the other is a national bank,” he says, declining to name names.

Go2neXt currently has 52 employees spread through the country, plus a chain of contributing consultants in about 40 different cities. For 2012, the expectation of revenue is around R$25 million (or about US$14 million). “Those totals are based on a conservative scenario,” Pichini says — possibly thinking about what’s beyond the clouds.