Juan Carlos Perez

IT managers must be prepared to see half of all the well-known IT vendors doing business today disappear in the next three years, either through mergers or bankruptcy, according to market research firm Gartner Inc.

EBay Inc. announced Monday it would buy a 19.5 per cent stake in MercadoLibre SA, a company that runs online auction sites serving Latin America, Spain and U.S. Hispanics.

Latin American countries will postpone wireless spectrum auctions and mobile carriers will put network expansions on hold as the economic damage from the terrorist attacks against the United States trickles down south of the border.

America Online Latin America Inc. will lay off 133 employees, a 7.6 per cent workforce reduction, the company announced in a filing Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Violating basic laws of economics and market dynamics has led to the death or near bankruptcy of many of the Internet companies launched in recent years to serve Latin America, speakers said last Thursday at the LatinTech 2001 conference in Miami.

A network access point (NAP) designed to improve Internet traffic between the United States and Latin America will become operational in June in Miami through a project supported by a consortium of more than 100 telecommunications companies including AT&T Corp., Sprint Corp., Global Crossing Ltd., SBC Communications Inc. and Cable & Wireless PLC.

Vendors will turn up the heat on Latin America in the coming years because IT spending in the region will grow faster than anywhere in the world, a situation that puts Latin American IT managers in a difficult situation: having to make good purchasing decisions in light of a deluge of vendor overtures, according to a Gartner Group Inc. analyst.

Microsoft Corp. expects Latin American companies to be among the first adopters of its new .Net platform, because customers in the region have traditionally been early users of new technologies, said Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer during a keynote and subsequent press conference at the start of the company's Latin America Enterprise Solutions Conference 2001.