Indian tech multinational stepping up Colombia, Brazil investments

Enterprise IT management services company ManageEngine, which is part of Indian tech multinational Zoho, is stepping up its 2022-23 investments in Latin America. 

The expansion is targeted mostly at the expansion of its operations in Colombia and Brazil, two of its core regional markets.

“We opened two offices this year: one in Bogotá and another one in São Paulo. Our plan is to add 20-30 employees to these locations by 2023. We also plan to double our office space in these two cities,” ManageEngine’s technical manager and Brazil lead, Tonimar Dal Aba, told BNamericas.

ManageEngine, which already had an office in Brazil, does not disclose investment or revenue figures, Dal Alba said when asked about capex projections.

The company has more than 7,000 customers across Latin America, Dal Alba said, which represents about 2.5% of the global customer base of 280,000. 

In addition to Brazil and Colombia, ManageEngine is also looking at beefing up its Mexican operations, according to the executive. 

ManageEngine plans to take an internship program already launched in the other two markets to Mexico, Dal Alba said.

Behind the company's LatAm push are growing technology investments made by corporates to virtualize and digitize their operations. 

As more and more companies press ahead with digital transformation and automate systems, many turn to third-party providers to monitor and manage their assets. 

These include routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, wireless LAN controllers, servers, storage devices, and even access control platforms.

Furthermore, with the consolidation of hybrid working formats, significant demand has been created for cloud-based solutions to enable the remote model in a secure manner, according to ManageEngine.

In LatAm, the company offers roughly 60 different enterprise IT management solutions, said Dal Alba. 

In Brazil, its main LatAm market, the company reported 43% year-over-year sales growth in 2021.

COMPETITION

The Indian group faces stiff competition from different players depending on the type of solution it offers, with rivals including the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Paessler, Broadcom, Solarwinds and ServiceNow.

Paessler, for example, is also expanding its regional investments to meet growing IT and OT management demands. The German company reports having around 20,000 customers in LatAm, which is 6-7% of the total.

"Our growth has been exponential in the last five, six years. We’re reaching more and more users, who are adopting monitoring [of networks and systems] as a good practice to be proactive, rather than reactive," Paessler's global business development manager for IoT, David Montoya, told BNamericas in March.