Everything’s Bigger in Brazil

The population (191 million), the market opportunity – heck, even the bugs – are huge in Brazil, to which my boss Craig Gleason and I can attest after our visit last week to Sao Paulo.

After being rear-ended (driving in Brazil isn’t for the faint of heart) we ended up in a police station (see below) in the middle of nowhere at night, jungle around us. We sat for hours on hard plastic chairs, swatting away bugs the size of F16s, while we communicated via my basic Portuguese and Google Translate on our laptops. In the end, all was well, though we did learn that as soon as you arrive in Brazil, it’s a good idea to get your driver’s license translated into Portuguese.

Our reason for being in Sao Paulo was to walk the ECM Show 2010, also attended by companies representing the life sciences, government, natural resources, and banking and finance industries in this greenfield market.

We had lots of great conversations with our existing OEM partners, such as EMC and Open Text, and with our system integrator partner, Accenture. There was also some talk on the show floor about SharePoint – a relatively new hot topic in Brazil.

As well, we chatted with an executive responsible for Latin America for Alfresco, the open source enterprise content management vendor that seems to be showing up everywhere. He told us that demand for PDF rendering comes up frequently in conversations he has these days. Alfresco is interesting in talking about a potential integration of Alfresco with Adlib Express.

Aside from our little adventure with the law, we had a very productive and informative time in Sao Paulo, and expect to have a lot more conversations with Brazilians in the near future.