Business View Caribbean September/October 2018

50 51 decision to open the subsidiary in Costa Rica. We started operations in April 2016, with 14 employees; today we’re above a hundred. Our main focus is application services, infrastruc- ture, cloud and security services, and enterprise application services including software devel- opment and support, and business analytics. We’re trying to get into the Big Data space and create a niche in Costa Rica to serve the Ameri- cas in general.” Apuy says that NTT’s competition in Costa Rica includes all sizes of technology companies. “Big ones, small ones, medium size –you name it. But the demand for different skill sets and technologies is bigger than what the current market can supply,” he states. “One of the things that we, as a company, do to alleviate that is to create internal programs where we upscale and train researchers and turn them into people who have good proficiency in those technolo- gies, so we can offer good quality candidates to our customers. And since we serve all industries –public sector, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, medical, financial, insurance, etc.–with more than 20 years of experience, we have developed skill sets that are unique.We leverage those skill sets in the different centers where we have a presence, to train or upscale our own people NTT DATA COSTA RICA wherever they are, and Costa Rica is not an exception.” “So, say we need something like development on Lightning, which is a new language inter- face for Salesforce. That’s brand new; just a few people have it across the globe,”Apuy contin- ues. “We have a Center of Excellence in the U.S. where we have a program to train and certify most of our developers and consultants using our internal resources. So, we can send a solid candidate with certifications to a client. That’s something that’s not available from all compa- nies.We have this and we try to leverage it as much as possible. “We pay attention to our people, so when they’re working on stuff, it’s quite common for them to feel that they are more on the client’s side than ours.We make sure they have a prop-