By Filipe Pacheco

THE CHALLENGES OF STARTING UP A BUSINESS IN BRAZIL are not always confined to the labyrinth of government regulations. Sometimes the biggest obstacle is an old classic: selling the benefits of a different way of doing things. Knowing the local lingo is also a big deal.

Sourcing Brazil talked recently with Kelly Zeni, who has worked for many of the biggest IT players in the nation and is now country manager for an American company that wants to crack the growing Brazil market.

Zeni is a native of Curitiba, a technology hub and capital of the southern state of Paraná. She graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and, for years, worked for several giants of the tech sector like AT&T, Siemens, and Westcon (a value-added distributor for Nortel). Client relations has always been a big part of her job.

Eventually she decided to invest in her own ideas and opened a consulting office to help fund some of the innovation flourishing here. Nowadays, while working for Tangelo and trying to boost entrepreneurial small and mid-size companies, Zeni is also the Brazil country manager for Solix Technologies, a California-based company specializing in sophisticated data archiving and management.

As a representative of a firm that is basically unknown here, Zeni says her biggest difficulty has been explaining to potential Brazilian clients it is that Solix’s solutions can do for them. “Our companies are still very narrow-minded,” she says. “They know they need different solutions, but they are not very open to what is new.”

Archiving Structured Data

The Solix product line she represents here essentially provides enterprise-grade storage capacity (starting at 1 terabyte) for organizations to archive and manage compiled data from clients and suppliers. The solutions can be customized according to the types of businesses.

Solix develops systems for sophisticated data archiving and management of structured data. One goal of their systems is to not only store data for its required length of time but also shift it to appropriate storage tiers — files that no one ever uses anymore and are not required for legal compliance can be stored on cheap backup tape, for example, while critical information is stored on high-speed, heavy-duty hardware.

Part of the benefit is you can save money by no longer using prime storage space for the stuff no one will ever need again.

“Our first difficulty is explaining to our potential customers what exactly we are selling,” Zeni says. Her clients are basically IT and outsourcing companies, but especially from the service and manufacturing industries. They already work with Oracle, JDEdwards, and Peoplesoft systems.

Zeni explains that data archiving is not exactly new, but it is a novelty for most companies in Brazil, she says. Many of them started working with enterprise resource planning (ERP), or integrated systems for business management, around 8 years ago. The product Solix sells is focused on archiving and managing all the structured data generated by ERP systems.

Eventually these companies get to the moment “when they start to worry about what to do with the data they have collected so far, and how to keep all that information properly,” she says.

“We deal with structured information, like fiscal data from suppliers and from different clients that is inserted into Oracle, SAP, or SQL systems. First, it is hard for some companies to understand that. Second, they are reluctant to try different solutions,” Zeni says. “They know what their ‘pain’ is when it comes to data archiving and management, but they simply think that adding storage space is enough, that it’s the right medicine. That is not true!”

The financial IT industry in the country, considered one of the most modern in the world, was a potential niche of clients for Solix in Brazil. But many of the systems used by the banks are so heavily customized that “it would be necessary to develop different products for each of them,” Zeni says.

One positive aspect, she says, is that the widespread use of Oracle systems throughout the country helps with the implementation of Solix products, since Solix and Oracle have a strong partnership outside Brazil.

Learn Your Portuguese

Technology aside, many times the challenges of doing business here start in the pre-selling negotiations. If an American IT vendor does not have staff here, many prospective clients don’t even consider meeting with them — “simply because they [the clients] do not speak English very well,” Zeni says. “That is sad, but it is true.”

The world of sourcing is fraught with language problems. Linguistic misunderstandings can cause havoc, confusion, and even missed deadlines. Zeni tells a story that demonstrates how some people would prefer to just avoid those possibilities altogether:

One time a company based in Poland made contact with her by e-mail, in English. They were interested in learning more about possible clients in Brazil. Zeni, who is fluent in the language, wrote back to them, explaining everything she thought they should know about Brazilian business and laying out the local IT landscape for them. She even sent them names of contacts that could be potential clients, with hints on how to approach them. But she warned the Poles that she was not sure these Brazilian business people would be able to negotiate in English. “I believe they [the Polish company] were so disappointed by that fact that they simply gave up,” Zeni says. “I never heard from them again.”