By Filipe Pacheco

Heavy industry in Minas Gerais, Brazil.

NEORIS MIGHT BE THE ONLY TECHNOLOGY OUTSOURCING COMPANY that was spun out of the cement industry. But from that inauspicious beginning as a unit of Mexico’s Cemex, it has grown to become one of Latin America’s largest providers of IT and BPO services. Now, like some of its competitors, it is counting on Brazil to spur further growth: The firm expects that by 2013, one-third of its yearly income will come from its Brazilian activities.

And in a sort of reverse of history, the company is also exploring Portugal as a location for possible expansion.

To boost its operations in Brazil – where today it has about 600 employees, which could climb to nearly 1,000 by the end of the year – Neoris has just inaugurated a new global center in Barueri, a regional tech hub located a few miles from São Paulo. The new facility employs about 150 people, but has capacity for about 250. “We chose Barueri to do research and development that will be delivered to our clients all over the world,” says Frederico Vilar, Neoris country manager in Brazil.

From Barueri, the local Neoris team will work in constant contact with the company’s four other global centers in Rosario (Argentina), Monterrey (Mexico), Madrid (Spain), and Budapest (Hungary). (Company headquarters are in Miami, possibly the most Latin city in the United States.)

The Barueri facility will be Neoris’s main software development factory in Brazil, as well as a center for testing and services related to application management. Much of the focus will be on the use of SAP tools – such as SAP ERP, Portal Business Intelligence, CRM, and manufacturing integration and intelligence, or MII. Neoris is a certified SAP Global Services Partner.

Vilar explains that MII services have become very important for the company in Brazil. Basically it involves developing technology for the manufacturing industry to boost production by increasing interaction between the factory floor and the offices that control the enterprise. For a mining plant, for example, Neoris designs dashboards and systems that control the whole production process from the moment the mineral enters the plant until it goes out the factory door.

(Further evidence of the importance of providing IT services for the mining and metals industry in Brazil is Stefanini’s recent opening of a software center in mineral-rich Minas Gerais.)

Neoris has developed an MII platform for Usiminas, one of the most important Brazilian companies in that industry segment. In Barueri, the company will host its “Perfect Plant” center: a laboratory to develop software simulations for dashboards. Neoris has about 40 professionals dedicated to the development of MII solutions in Brazil, and Vilar told Sourcing Brazil that about 14 more should be hired in the short term to join that team.

Besides Usiminas, other clients of Neoris Brazil include McDonald’s, Nestlé, Santander, Bradesco, Lanxes, Claro, and Souza Cruz, among others.

Even though 90% of the operations hosted within Brazil today deliver their services to domestic clients, Neoris’s goal is to grow more aggressively in the international market, Vilar says. From Brazil, “it will be possible to aggregate value to each project executed, independent of its location,” he says.

Businesses Want Mobile Intelligence

Business intelligence is another segment being looked at very closely by Vilar and his team. Of the average 50 proposals the company receives a week, about 70% are related to BI, particularly mobile BI. According to the country manager, “the Brazilian business leaders have started to feel more and more that mobility is essential to their operations.”

As part of its strategy for domestic growth in Brazil, Neoris considers the Northeast region of the country very attractive. (For decades the region has been forgotten by international companies in terms of investments.) The company already has an office in Fortaleza, capital city of the state of Ceará, and that’s where it will concentrate development in that region, “especially focusing on wind-power industries,” Vilar says.

< Read the Nearshore Americas interview with Neoris CEO Claudio Muruzabal about private equity investments here >.

Reviving Portuguese Roots

Vilar has headed up Neoris’s operations in Brazil since May of 2008. Originally from Lisbon, he has preserved a Portuguese accent, but clearly knows the local IT industry very well. He worked for years for Sonda Prockwork and W3, always involved with SAP practices and services. At the beginning of his career, he worked for Tecnidata, one of the biggest IT players in Portugal.

With Portugal going through one of its deepest economic crises in decades, Vilar says he believes it is the right moment for Brazilian companies to consider growing in the Portuguese and European markets, due to the strong economic development Brazil is experiencing today. It is natural for the nation’s IT and outsourcing players to consider Portugal as a client, he says, due to the close cultural background and the advantage of sharing the same language. Besides, the hard economic situation there makes the operational costs much lower than in the past, especially in terms of payroll.

“It is a natural region of growth and expansion, but not remembered by many players in Brazil,” says Vilar, who has already traveled to Portugal and met with local players to discuss business and explore possible mergers and acquisitions. “But all those talks are still in a very early stage,” he says.