Argentina: More near-shore than offshore

What factors are responsible for the open-source expertise that you ascribe to the Argentine tech industry?
When there was a lot of investment in IT in Argentina -- there wasn't much call for open-source software or the skills to implement it. But following the devaluation in 2001, there was a special need for those tools because they were free. There was a market need for those tools in Buenos Aires.

Because you couldn't afford to buy in proprietary technology anymore?
Yeah, that's right. That is why we have that big market of people doing these kinds of things. Companies needed to stop investing in things such SAP but still find a way of doing the same thing in a cheaper way.

So while other countries have only recently woken up to the potential saving they can make from using open source, Argentina had those cost-savings forced on it three years ago and is consequently ahead of the curve now?
Yes, that was the case.

Globant isn't the only company offering offshoring services to US and European companies -- what differentiates you from the competition?
We are working hard on making offshoring more palatable by killing the distance problem that afflicts the whole process. What we are doing for customer is installing an IP Telephony hotline that connects them with us for free. With Lastminute.com and EMC, for example, we have these direct phones, and now we are working to integrate the two PBXs. This means you can make these calls over a normal phone by typing in five digits and connect with Buenos Aires, immediately, at no cost.

One of the advantages Lastminute cited is that your contractors have European passports and were able to come over and work on site for several months. What's the background to this?
What you have to understand about Argentina is that before the First World War - say 1914 - there were only two or three million people living in the country. Starting with the First World War and ending in about 1950 there was a massive immigration from Italy and Spain. Today you walk through Buenos Aires and all you see is European people. Of course, we are South Americans but of these people of European descent, about 70 per cent have European passports. We don't have a very big cultural gap between the European guys and the Argentinean people.