Cloud Computing, Brazil, and the World Cup: An Unexpected Connection

Football and Cloud Computing might seem like “chalk and cheese” as they say in England, but as I recently found out, there is a very real connection and it appears to be a major factor in the adoption of cloud services in Brazil. Let me explain…

One of the most interesting aspects of a cloud start-up is to observe the geographic distribution of new customers. We launched CloudAlly earlier this year and have been growing our customer base in the US, the UK and Australia, but have also seen considerable activity in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as South America, specifically in Brazil.

Of course Brazil puts the “B” in “BRIC”, as in Brazil, Russia, India and China, when referring to emerging economies, but the fact that most of our new clients from Brazil are in the Advertising industry really had me puzzled.

I was talking to Jonathan Toni, Sales Director of UK based Compare the Cloud, about this recently and without missing a beat he said “No offense, but an American probably wouldn’t get it.” He went on to explain that Brazil was hosting the 2014 FIFA World Cup and that companies from around the world are already lining up for a piece of the advertising pie.

Brazil has earmarked over USD $12 billion in IT infrastructure development funds to support the event, and forecasts an additional USD $104 billion in economic activity. An event of this magnitude generates a staggering amount of advertising spending, and in fact Nike and Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi Brazil appear to have already kicked things off with a very edgy ad campaign called “Addiction”.

Combined with the fact that Rio de Janeiro is set to host the 2016 Olympic Games, it’s really no wonder that Ad agencies in Brazil are building out their infrastructure in anticipation of an onslaught of new business activity. The fact that they’re migrating to cloud services such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps is a very telling sign, and a very good one for cloud backup services such as CloudAlly.

Chris Ward, Editor of Business Cloud News, shed some additional light on the subject with his recent article Is Brazilian market ready for cloud? As Chris points out, with a population of over 200 million (the world’s fifth largest country), over 6 million SMBs and growing rapidly, and a combined IT and Outsourcing market of over USD $39 billion, all signs point to cost-effective cloud services playing a major roll in the strategic growth plans of SMBs across Brazil.

So rather than chalk and cheese, it appears that football and cloud computing “get on like a house on fire” (you’ve got to love the Brits), and the 2014 World Cup is exactly the type of catalyst needed to start Brazil’s migration to the cloud ahead of schedule.