Gartner: Brazil better
By Pulkit Sharma

Gartner is one of the world's leading information technology research and advisory companies and has 4000 Associates in 80 countries. It says it has 60 thousand clients. Its reports and recommendations are used by big business to buy expensive goods and services.

While Gartner has recommended India in general and promoted a number of Indian tech majors, what its senior executives say outside India is sometimes of relevance to our IT-ITES Sector.

Zdnet has just published an article where journalist Tom Foremski interviewed Gartner Senior VP of Outsourcing, Richard Matlus.

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Richard Matlus says that US companies like working with Latin American companies because:

- The quality is very good. He doesn’t recommend India for prime time zone outsourced infrastructure support services.

- It helps a lot that the time zones in South America are so close to the US, this means that the prime times are covered in the same time zones. If most of your customers are in a certain time zone, you can have your best quality people working in the same shift, which is very important for customer satisfaction.

Mr Matlus says that this is one of the largest cited advantages among clients. His clients tend to use teams in India for the other two less important daily shifts.

- South Americans speak good English but, more importantly, they also have a better at understanding the culture of the US — that makes a very big difference in terms of management and the quality of support.
“

Outsourced infrastructure support services involve looking after the hardware and software issues of the client. IBM’s Infrastructure Support Services can resolve more than 60 percent of the client’s issues over the phone.  Most major tech companies offer this service.

Interesting to read Gartner’s views that as compared to India, Brazil has a better understanding of American culture and can more efficiently support Infrastructure during prime hours.