Cesar DOnofrio, Common Sense CEO was a panelist at Nearshore Nexus, a summit organized to expose new, powerful opportunities driven through the “New Axis of Outsourcing” between the United States and Latin America. We are sharing Cesar’s overview of the event:

On March 26th I was a panelist at Nearshore Nexus. It was the inaugural edition organized by NearshoreAmericas the business news site ITO and BPO for the emerging Americas off shoring industry. Overall it was a great place to discuss the difficulties and issues of offering IT nearshore.

We arrived a day before the event in New Jersey with Juan De Abreu, our VP and Delivery Director, so we could attend the pre event party on Monday evening. We finally met the organizer and NearshoreAmericas CEO Kirk Laughlin and some interesting people such as Bob Scheier Editor of GlobalDeliveryReport, DJ Edgerton CEO/Co-Founder of Zemoga from Colombia, Daniel Chavez and Luis Saldaña, CEO and CTO at Dextra Technologies, who talked about the challenges and opportunities of the industry.

The following day, early in the morning we set up the Common Sense booth with our new video and after a big cup of coffee we were ready for the big day!

The sessions started as planned, at 8.30am right after the introduction by Kirk Laughlin. All the speakers were very interesting, I would like to highlight:

• Ray Wang, CEO at Constellation Research did his presentation about The Future of Enterprise Software
• Dawn Evans, CEO at Sourcing Interests Group interviewed Nicole Brouillard, CIO Chubb
• Dr. Jerry Luftman, Distinguished Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology presented “State of IT Offshoring: The CIO’s Agenda in an Era of Rapid Change”
• After Jerry’s presentation, he moderated the panel “Turning Disruption into Opportunity”, where I did my part along with John Edwards, John McCormick, Enzo Micali and Antonio Moreira.

I would like to thank Monique Lewis for the interview for Mergermarket magazine.

I didn’t have much time to attend other presentations but I really enjoyed the last one: “Making the Deal Work: Culture, Creativity and Building Relationships that Can Weather All Storms” with Kirk Laughlin as moderator and Julia Santos, Head of Global Business Optimization & Contracting at Johnson & Johnson, and DJ Edgerton among others.

My Nexus Conclusions:

• We, the Nearshore providers, are not doing a good job at marketing ourselves.
• At present there is no Association for the industry, this highlights the great need of a Nearshore Association.
• Julia Santos emphasized the need of working together as a group, I also mentioned that in my panel. This feature is part of our culture but definitely is something that we have to change if we want to grow as Industry or in market share.
• After talking with some of our colleagues, we concluded that the acquisition of talent is a problem for everyone (India, Malaysia, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and so more).
• Mobile services are no more a niche. Every company at the event offered mobile solutions in someway or another.
• We discussed with some the need of creating a Nearshore Association, more info about this coming soon!