I recently had a great opportunity to visit with customers and field teams in Brazil. I leaned a lot. Including that Google Translate can be your best friend when traveling alone in a country where most people do not speak English. 🙂

Brazil is an amazing country and represents one of the largest areas of IT investment in the world. Even though the local economy has been challenged in providing positive growth over the last few years, investments in technology soared by more than 20%.

A big area of interest with IT teams was in cool, new data center infrastructure. Technologies such as converged and hyper converged, software defined storage, and, of course, flash for primary storage. No surprise that lowering costs, reducing footprint and energy requirements, and making apps run faster all continue to be important drivers. But what surprised me was how every organization I met with was also looking to leverage these technologies as part of their strategy to drive new business initiatives and provide more competitive advantages.

My big take away was that even though there have been challenges in the local economy, IT organizations are not just trying to reduce costs to ride out the storm.  They are continuing to put their foot on the gas in their IT investments (which in Sao Paulo traffic is no easy task). So as the economy continues to rebound, they will be stronger and well positioned for the future.

I also got a chance to meet with the one of the leading technology publications in Brasil, Convergência Digital. We had a great discussion about the fast growth of All Flash adoption and the challenges faced by for corporations that have legacy systems.

Migração para armazenamento all-flash é inevitável (English translation: The migration to all flash storage in inevitable).

You can check out the interview here.