Globant

Just like pregnant couples who already know if their baby will be a girl or a boy, but cannot agree on the baby’s name, Martín Migoya and his three partners -- all of them engineers from Argentina -- had reached a deadline without knowing how the company they had pictured together would be called.

Only a day before printing their first business proposal for their first client, the young partners still did not know what to call their nascent company. Migoya only knew that he wanted the name to end with the letters “ant” because he had noticed several successful technology companies bore names ending in either “ant” or “ent”.

So the software engineers decided to create a program that combined the first syllables of all the words in the Spanish dictionary with the termination “ant”. At the same time, the program checked whether such combinations had already been registered as dot com domains on the World Wide Web.

“The program did its job overnight and the next morning we had a list with hundreds of alternatives. We started going over it, a bit in a hurry, and when we reached ‘globant’ we said ‘enough, this is the name of the company,’” Migoya recalls six years later during a conversation with Poder360 in a hotel in New York City’s Midtown.

As is often the case with successful companies in the technology sector, Globant experienced magnificent growth in a short time. In 2004, the company had just 70 employees and revenue nearing three million dollars. Last year, the company employed around 1,200 people and had estimated revenue of $40 million.

The adventure started in 2003, when Migoya, Martín Umaran and two other friends -- Guibert Englebienne and Néstor Nocetti -- were still working (or had been working) in first-rate multinational companies like IBM, Santander Bank, Repsol YPF and ENAP - the Chilean state-owned oil company.

Taking The Leap

The foursome felt, however, that they were ready to take a leap and start their own long-term project. So they decided to create a business with the ambitious goal of making it the best software product development and maintenance company around.

The Friday I met with Globant’s CEO Migoya and its COO Umaran, the happy hour crowd at the Warwick New York Hotel’s bar and lounge had become quite noisy, so I hinted to the interviewees to come closer to my digital recorder. With no hesitation, Migoya takes it with his hand, puts it near his mouth and assumes the roles of interviewer and interviewee simultaneously.

Umaran follows his partner but leaves all flippant performances aside. He sips his soda, takes the tape recorder from Migoya, and proceeds to narrate how the creation of Globant was inspired in the amazing growth of the IT outsourcing industry in India.

“Until its explosion as a technological hub, not many people imagined that India could become the center of dozens of companies with thousands of employees and with such levels of computing services exports,” Umaran says. “With the Indian model as a reference we told ourselves why not do this in Argentina.”

“If they are capable of creating the conditions for people to work from India providing services to the most important companies in the world, why can’t we do it,” he asks.

Migoya and Umaran seem undaunted by the potential obstacles posed by the differences in scale between the Indian economy and Argentina’s. They have a clear answer to this hurdle, so much so both feel the urge to respond.

“It was done in Ireland at a much smaller scale and it was also tremendously successful,” Migoya says beating Umaran to the recorder. “In these models, quantity is not all. And if that were the case, Latin America as a region has an enormous potential. So it’s not only about Argentina, but also Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay and Peru, and in that sense a great number of IT professionals. For all that, it is possible to have a company with 10 or 20 thousand employees in Latin America.”

“We have no limits at Globant,” Umaran chimes in. “How far do we want to go? Well, as far as we are capable.”

His words may be grounded in facts. From its inauguration the company has opened offices in United States (Boston, Silicon Valley), England (London), México (Mexico City), Colombia (Bogotá), and several Argentine cities (Buenos Aires, Tandil, Córdoba, Rosario, and La Plata), from where it provides services and support to companies around the globe.

These two Globers -- as Globant workers call themselves -- see more advantages in heading software operations in Latin America than in any other region. They single out the similarity in time zones and culture with the US and EU to prove their point.

Thinking Big

The meteoric rise of Globant provides evidence that Migoya, Umaran, Englebienne and Nocetti had their feet grounded when they started thinking big.

In a short time Globant has specialized its services in social networking, gaming, e-commerce, mobile solutions, virtualization and cloud computing. Globant provides services to Google, Electronic Arts, LinkedIn, Orkut, EMC², JWT, Yahoo!, Coca Cola, and Sabre, among others. In addition, Globant was the first company outside Silicon Valley to develop products for Google.

“And very soon we will announce new clients, large and well connected to the film and entertainment world,” Umaran says as if he were a little boy who cannot keep a secret.

Globant’s leaders say Globant has no limits to its expansion and growth. This relentless ambition has been an icon of the company and it’s leaders since the beginning.

“When we were setting up the company we had to number the computers,” Umaran says. “I was in charge of this task and for some reason I chose to number the first PC 0001. I mean it didn’t have two or three digits, but four. This register allowed us to give us enough margin to have up to 9999 computers.”

“We’re Looking for Talent”

Migoya and Umaran are in New York on this occasion to finish forming Globant’s board of advisors. It was a flash trip and the tiredness is hard to disguise. In less than two hours they have to check in at JFK to take the flight back to Argentina. They agree the trips are tedious and can’t wait to arrive in Buenos Aires; both confess they suffer every day they spend away from their wives and children.

That’s why family support and on-the-job luxuries are fundamental pillars of Globant’s professional development. It’s part of the reason the company has medium-size offices in several places instead of grouping all employees in one mega-office.

The geographic dispersion of its offices and the latitudes separating these offices from clients made it necessary for Globers to have unique skills. Globant’s leaders developed a quirky recruitment methodology to find the right people.

Migoya remembers, for example, when Globant launched a campaign to search for key IT professionals. The company posted advertisements on job listings sites that gave no mention of Globant or the position they were hiring for. Instead, the posting only said, “we’re looking for talent” and provided a word problem for applicants to solve. Only those who could solve the puzzle were invited to submit their resumes.

Once hired, Globant – faithful to Google’s style – fomented creativity amongst globers by turning the company’s facilities and infrastructure into an environment of relaxation and entertainment. Some of the offices have tennis tables, football tables, video games, music studios, areas to practice yoga, aerobics, salsa, massage salons, personal trainers and even a climbing wall.

Along For the Ride

Partly beacuase of these perks Globant’s creation story is well known within Argentina. “It’s about the story of four Argentine engineers who graduated from public universities and were capable of developing world class products for Google, LinkedIn, Nike, Electronic Arts to use,” Migoya tells me.

Outside of Argentina, however, Migoya believes the story must be grounded in the company’s achievements and success, “like becoming the first developer for Google outside the Silicon Valley or the capacity to attract clients with the size of Electronics Arts.”

Long outgrowing the advice they use to receive from friends, the duo says it now needs experts in IT business development to help them take their company to the even greater heights.

To this end Globant has hired executives with great experience in the IT world. At the end of 2007 Globant hired CBO Guillermo Marsicovetere, who at the time was vice president of Sun Microsystems in the United Kingdom and Ireland. In October 2008, Alejandro Scannapieco was incorporated as CFO after he resigned from the same position at Microsoft South Cone. In April of this year they convinced Gonzalo Alonso to leave the general management of Google for all Spanish-speaking countries to become Globant’s Operations VP.

Now in their seventh year of existence, Globant’s two leaders are as enamored with their creation as any parent. They expect revenues of $60 million this year and through the first six months are on track to meet this goal. In addition, within the next two years its founders hope to list shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange and inaugurate Globant University - a public-private initiative in association with different universities (among others MIT).

None of the founders wants to miss what’s coming and it seems their new high-powered additions want to come along for the long ride.

“Here we are, pushing, promoting growth and managing to generate wealth and distribution around us. That’s our vision, so that Globant lasts one hundred years,” Migoya says confidently.