Viva Mexico! cries Camisa

As the CRM industry generally grows like wildfire, everyone’s looking for a new source of coding talent. Tempe, Ariz.-based solutions provider Camisa Technologies has found one. Company PR recently released some data regarding the agreement made with the Sonora, Mexico, state government last year. Solution provider Camisa Technologies, Tempe, Ariz., has tapped into a significant source of CRM/ERP programming talent after striking a deal last year with the Sonora state government in Mexico.

Through the deal, Camisa hired six programmers and developers for Sage CRM and four for Sage CRM Saleslogix. Due to the success of the program, Camisa is currently assembling a team for Microsoft CRM. Reporting on the issue Camisa faced pre-Sonora contract, Camisa sales and marketing vice president Warren Mills summed up the problem with “CRM is hot, but there are not a lot of people who can do the coding.”

Apparently, there are a few in Mexico: Camisa currently sports thirty 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. “It’s like offshoring in India except that you are in the same time zone in Mexico without the language issues,” he said. Though the latter claim would seem to be spurious (after all, India has more native speakers of English than does England), the former is an indisputable fact of geography that makes Camisa’s life easier.

Hermosillo is a mere one hour flight from Phoenix, allowing far more in-person contact between engineers and clients. And Camisa is using their new knowledge to expand outward, taking excess capacity through Mexico. Interestingly enough, this expansion and mutual benefit is all reportedly thanks to an internet search engine. A company contact at Quepasa.com (billed as “the Spanish-language equivalent of Yahoo”) informed the Camisa braintrust that the Sonora had put out a call to companies that would hire graduates of local universities in Hermosillo.