Outsourcing: César Gon, Founder And CEO, CI&T (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana Mitra: So, I understand the time zone issue. If you’re doing that kind of interactive customer relationship on every engagement, what is the technology infrastructure that is required? Does the technology collaboration infrastructure that you have put in place support that kind of customer interaction?

César Gon: I can talk about that one. They way we interact is video conferencing and Web type of interaction. Depending on the kind of engagement, we also have people on-site, but we also manage the day-to-day relationship with the kind of the client. So it is really a subset of connections among all the customers base and CI&T.

Sramana: So, there is nothing specific or special; it is just regular video conferencing and online collaboration infrastructure.

César: Yes. What is special, is the methodology and the kind of people we have in the infrastructure.

Sramana: What is the cost structure in Brazil? How does the cost structure in Brazil or Argentina compare with that does that compare with those in other big outsourcing countries.

César: I think Brazil is more expensive than others. You should consider only the labor costs; the Brazil for sure is more than in Asia and Argentina. So that is why I don’t think, if your business is more traditional, mass-production based, Brazil is not the place to be.

Sramana: How does that bench mark? It is more expensive, I understand. For example, India was once one tenth of the United States; it has now dropped to almost one third. Where would you put Brazil?

César: Brazil is double what India is. Think about unit costs per programmer, if you compare them. What is different about Brazil is that 99% of the Brazilian IT staff are working. You have people with more than 30 years’ experience, so CI&T has the experience of leveraging China, and China is a completely different market where you have a lot of junior employees available. But if you need people with a lot of experience or people with vertical skills, it is very hard to find, and that is if you find. Brazil has a more standard benchmark.

Sramana: How competitive is the Brazil market for talent? How many outsources are operating in Brazil? How many IT employers are operating in Brazil and competing for that same talent?

César: Brazil has about three million professionals working on IT and as a nation, 99% are supporting the local market and are engaged in international business, and the difference is that it is really a workforce than for the standard repetitive process. So you can leverage – so this kind of engagement I will describe where you have to do the ideation, the design; that is, understanding and participating in the solution design. It is a very good and flexible workforce, but for sure you are not going to find this for large BPOs. But it is still by far the largest workforce in the whole of Latin America.

Sramana: What about language skills, since you work with international clients? You do work primarily with international clients. What language does the work force use to communicate? Is English a requirement? Are English professionals easily available?

César: We normally try to use the local language to talk to the customers, so in Japan we use Japanese and for customers in the U.S., we use English, and so on. But normally for global companies, English is the official language, even if we speak in Japanese it is a requirement that the official project language should be English, so that is our challenge is in China. And Japan, it’s very similar. Both countries do not have English as a standard language, but I think we as a nation we start the company working with international customers, so from the beginning we have greatly valued these kind of skills, and over 16 years we have developed a lot of the strategies to improve our employees’ English skills, especially for the people who are on the front lines of customer engagement.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Outsourcing: César Gon, Founder And CEO, CI&T
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