The 500 biggest tech spenders: the exclusive Latin Trade annual ranking of the region's technology investment leaders

Latin Trade, June, 2003 by Greg Brown

RELATED ARTICLE: Change Agent

Rui da Costa, Hewlett-Packard's regional director for Latin America, is a career man in a rapidly changing, even chaotic business. When HP CEO Carly Fiorina launched the hotly debated merger with rival Compaq. Costa oversaw integration in Latin America. As direct-selling competitors like Dell Computer nip at his heels in hardware, he's trying to build a new, bigger business in services. A 26-year veteran of the company. Costa talks about managing change--lots of change.

How do you integrate, in Latin America, HP'S recent multi-billion-dollar outsourcing deals with Procter & Gamble and Ericsson?

HP, being a global company, has the resources to deploy this outsourcing capability across the globe, as well as in Latin America, We have in Latin America several deals we have been managing for some time, like Sadia, in Brazil. We have all the processes necessary to incorporate the people that will be absorbed by HP through these outsourcing deals.

Have you not simply switched employees laid off during the merger for new people?

The process of managing a work force when we had the merger was one in which we identified areas where we had duplication of resources. Definitely we had duplications in several back-office activities, like finance, accounting, and we had to rationalize some product lines. That made us more cost effective to go after the areas where our customers are asking us to participate.

How much of your region's business is now services, rather than hardware?

We always had very strong service revenue in Latin America. Right now we have 30% to 35% depending on the country. Remember, with the merger, in Latin America we became No.2 in services, with a lot of potential for growth.

When you want to close a deal, what do you say to convince customers?

Basically, that HP provides the products and solutions to give them the opportunity to reach their goals in terms of cost reduction, improving revenue streams and being competitive. On the consumer side, what our customers want is simple: rewarding experiences. And that we try to accomplish with innovations other companies can't bring to the market.

Ranking the 500

LATIN TRADE each year publishes an exclusive list of the region's Top 500 technology spenders based on a 17,000-company database maintained by San Antonio's Harte-Hanks. The tech-spender list counts installed hardware such as servers and desktop PC computers, then adds--with more emphasis in the total score-planned purchasing for the coming 12 monts.

Added to the scoring is the number of Internet users and phone extensions at the company, as well as the presence of advanced corporate software such as customer relationship management and purchasing systems. Each company is given a score on a 100-point scale, on the far right of the table and, subsequently, a ranking, on the far left.

Tailor Made

Heading the Latin America division of IBM, the world's tech giant, can Look easy. Bruno Di Leo, Big Blue's former top executive in Brazil and a 27-year veteran of the company, will tell you it's anything but easy. He's pushing the giant to service hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses that drive the Latin American market as well as handling the big deals, all the while Leading more than 9,000 IBM-ers in 20 countries. The Peruvian native, fluent in four Languages, talks about how small can be beautiful.