Doris Benavides

Buenos Aires may still be the capital of tango, but gone are the days of the dot-coms and prosperity of the IT sector. Many local businesses have closed, and those with foreign headquarters have either moved out of the country or cut their personnel and budget.

With its direct approach to sales and services and an aggressive focus on large accounts, Dell Computer Corp. has, in four years, gone from a minor player to a leader in Latin America

If you think competition among Canada

IT wholesaler Ingram Micro Inc. will distribute IBM Corp. products to small and medium-size resellers in Central America and the Caribbean, ending an exclusive arrangement under which GBM Corp. had distributed IBM goods for the past decade, mostly to large companies.

IT equipment distributor Ingram Micro Inc. is expanding its support services in Latin America to provide better help to its channel partners in the region.

Nortel Networks Corp. announced Monday it has opened new offices in Puerto Rico in order to expand its business there, one of the hot spots for the company's Latin America growth plans. From the new facilities, Nortel plans to extend its business in the rest of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

There's a saying in Spanish, "no hay mal que por bien no venga" (every cloud has a silver lining), which sums up well the views of a small panel that assembled in Los Angeles Friday to discuss e-commerce opportunities in Latin America. Even when times are hard, they said, opportunities present themselves to the industrious.

This could be a tough year for makers of electronic-business software, according to Thomas Siebel, chairman and chief executive officer of Siebel Systems Inc., who predicted in a Thursday keynote speech at Internet World 70 percent of the vendors in that market will be out of business by the end of 2001.