Creative IT Firm Makes History In Argentina

Outsourced IT work traditionally has gone to Indian firms. But as the outsourced work becomes more creatively demanding, major tech companies such as Google and LinkedIn have turned to an IT company in Argentina, to create apps.

In 2003, Guibert Englebienne co-founded Globant after he saw there was a middle class in Argentina with IT talent that could be cultivated and put to work. Today Globant has a number of firms scattered throughout the country--a model that is based on the growth of Indian IT firms, Englebienne said.

Nearly 10 years after Globant was founded, the Argentine software development company has grown to 3,000 employees and raked in more than $90 million in revenue, making it one of the fastest growing companies in Argentina's history.

Englebienne told me at the Intel Capital Global Summit last week that Globant employees are executing around 250 projects at any given moment. The company is broken up into a number of studios: consumer experience, gaming, big data/high performance, quality engineering, creative and social, mobile, and cloud computing.

The big break for the company came when Google picked Globant as its first outsourced design firm in 2006. Since then, Globant has attracted a number of other tech firms in the valley including LinkedIn and Zynga.

Globant's newest studio is enterprise consumerization, which capitalizes on the trend of consumerization of IT.

"The dictatorial times of IT are virtually gone" due to the adoption of BYOD and CoIT, said Englebienne. "Whether that is an internal social network that leverages our knowledge of Facebook, or a gamified incentive program, there are many [ways] in which we can make for happier employees and more productive organizations," he said.

With any app, customer service is paramount, said Englebienne, who uses his experience developing games to make his company successful. "Adapting rapidly to feedback will be extremely important to increase the adoption of your product. If you understand how games work, you can use that to drive change within the organization."