VAR Enlists Software Talent From Mexico

"CRM is hot, but there are not a lot of people who can do the coding," said Warren Mills, a former MicroAge and Advanti executive who joined Camisa late last year as vice president of sales and marketing. But last year, through a Mexican friend at Quepasa.com, the Spanish equivalent of Yahoo, Camisa heard that the government of Sonora was offering development money to companies that would hire graduates of local universities in Hermosillo, Mexico.

As a result of the deal with Sonora, Camisa hired six programmers and developers for Sage CRM and four more for Sage CRM Saleslogix. The solution provider also is interviewing for a team for Microsoft CRM.

The addition of Mexico-based CRM programming talent has given Camisa a competitive edge, Mills said.

"It's like offshoring in India except that you are in the same time zone in Mexico without the language issues. These guys are coming out of what Mexico would call its MIT, and many of them have worked in the states and have excellent English skills," he said. "We can now deliver projects that were either impossible to do or too expensive to do."

Hermosillo is only an hour's flight from Phoenix, which allows the Mexican engineers to come to the states and meet with clients, he noted. "They can get involved with the requirements definition and the design phase on complex CRM projects," he said.

Camisa has 30 employees and about $3 million in annual revenue, but Mills expects sales and staff to double within a year, in large part because of the addition of Mexican software engineers.

Camisa's primary market is complex CRM projects, requiring integration with ERP systems, in the high end of small and midsize companies or in divisions of large companies, Mills said.

The Mexican software developers also have enabled Camisa to wholesale its CRM expertise to other VARs. "We are starting to take our excess capacity and are working with VARs across the country to do some of their work because they have peaks and valleys, and there is no way they can staff to a peak," Mills said.

And the move has allowed Camisa to take more of a solutions approach to the market because the company has taken U.S.-based employees and switched them from coding software to working as designers, business analysts and project managers.

"Instead of saying, 'I understand you are interested in CRM,' we can say, 'I understand that you have business issues. Maybe we have some technology that can help,' " he said.