CIAB Febraban : The Biggest Show In Latin America

In the Brazilian IT market, banks and financial institutions are big stake holders (say around 70%) . Febraban is an association of all IT department of banks and financial institutions. In short, it's a very powerful association as it collectively represents a big chunk of buyers with a large budget. CIAB Febraban is a trade show that brings the latest technology and Febraban together. It showcases the latest innovations in technology, latest solutions from IT solution vendors like HP, Microsoft, IBM, Steffanini and the who' who of the Brazilian / Latin American market. It's a great place to showcase your solution provided you have 100k USD and upwards for a booth, however most vendors are happy to be there. Guess, it pays off. I had a chance to visit CIAB Febraban a couple of weeks back only because of our partner - Inspirit Technologies . I was also happy to see Infosys with Finacle in the space for  International vendors. Pics from the event




HDI Brazil

HDI Brazil has grown by over 40% this year in terms of the number of participants. As I had very modest expectations from HDI Brazil, it turned out to be better than I expected. It started off with a keynote from Malcolm Fry and closed with an roaring presentation from trainer in O Bope . I am assuming it was great because the audience were spell bound and laughing their guts out, I couldn't understand his portuges that well.






Brazilian HelpDesk Space

By and large the Brazilian helpdesk space seemed to a bit service-oriented. Asyst International sponsored the keynote (not to be mistaken with with Axios System's Assyst ), I was unable to find an shrink-wrap product in their website. There were a few other players who were saying SaaS, but for the most part they were offering hosted versions. I think ManageEngine was the only booth that was offering a real-time product demo and download-able software, the rest all were ppts or flash presentations

Call You Free - One Interesting Company

CYF - www.cyf.com.br - Ok, this was the only company that caught my attention, They have a flash application on the website that allows you to make calls instantly - no-plugins or software installs required, you just need flash. They integrated with phone lines and voip apps. I tried out the voice demo, the connection and the voice quality was decent. They still need to work on apis and providing control to customer support software apps. 


Conference-and-Exhibition-Run-Parallel Format Needs to be changed

I am not a big fan of running conferences and exhibitions in parallel. It's very hard to have meaningful conversations with visitors when they are rushing from one conference to another or in the coffee breaks. Cisco Networkers has the same format and it sucks big time. Once the complete attention is given to the exhibition vendor will come up with innovative things to engage customers. It can be seminars or shows or even a full fledged boxing match like it happens in Interop Las Vegas. The exhibitions needs some undivided attention.

Big and Better International Participation

When I spoke to a lot of customers and visitor most of them are eager to understand how international businesses run their operations. They were eagar to learn from IT managers around the world. HDI needs to bring international champion to share at the growing markets like Brazil. Brazilians do things in  their own way but they like to listen and learn from the Gringos, HDI needs to bring a lot of gringos to get some good participation and knowledge sharing. Looking for the next HDI.