Latin America is rapidly embracing new technologies at a faster pace than anywhere else worldwide, and companies across the board see the potential to adopt and adapt digital solutions to bolster their profitability and efficiency.
Once a technologically-starved region, Latin America (LatAm) is now home to a rapidly evolving technology sector, namely throughout its four largest economic powerhouses: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. And it's set to continue blooming.
Latin America Venture Capital Association’s (LAVCA) Annual Review of Tech Investment in 2022 makes this trend clear. Their recent report showed a dramatic rise in tech investments in the region, with deals reaching $15.7 billion in 2021, up more than triple from the $4.1 billion recorded in 2020. Of the total number of deals in LatAm, 90% of them were signed in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. And, according to the number of deals signed, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been one of the fastest growing sectors in the review since 2019.
In addition, companies operating in the region are quickly acquiring new technologies unlike anywhere else in the world. "Organizations in LatAm plan to adopt emerging technologies at a faster rate than in other regions, and they have less of a need to update end-of-life technology," according to information technology (IT) research firm Spiceworks Ziff Davis' 2022 State of IT. The firm's global report on tech trends includes for the first time a Latin America section, mostly focused on Brazil and Mexico — the region's two largest economies. The study's findings were obtained from a sample of 235 IT buyers in the region: 123 in Mexico and 112 in Brazil.
The report's findings show that companies in the region are more concerned with investing in the future than updating legacy systems of the past. By leapfrogging to the latest and greatest tech, companies are diving right into a new digital workflow that they can take advantage of to seamlessly optimize and enhance their daily operations.
According to the report, spending on new tech will accelerate faster in LatAm than in any other region in the world. 74% of buyers consulted in Brazil and 66% of buyers in Mexico plan to increase IT budgets in 2022, the greatest proportion of any region covered in their research.
It is clear that LatAm is poised for digital transformation. And the desire of companies to automate their processes and incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their operations is a trend evidenced in their report. Investments in IT automation technology are expected to grow 83% over the next two years and 77% for AI — two figures that surpass forecast investments for North America (73% for automation and 54% for AI) and Europe (69% for automation and 29% for AI) during the same period.
While the tech sector within the oil and gas realm is not growing as fast as finance technology in the region, exploration and production companies operating in Latin America understand the value of adopting new technology to drive their performance and significantly improve their profitability.
“The majority of our customers in Latin America have already embarked on digital transformation initiatives, at various levels, and see PetroVisor as a real alternative to integrate all their data management needs in one place, uncovering valuable information to make better decisions,” says Francisco Suarez, Datagration’s SVP of Latin America.
Today, exploration and production companies handle huge volumes of dispersed data as they operate their assets, which can become a maze and thus hamper maximum profitability. For Kenton Gray, Chief Technology Officer at Datagration, it’s essential to have a central hub that can streamline a wide variety of data. "That’s where a unified data architecture (UDA) comes into play. A central platform ensures that all data is stored, processed, analyzed, and easily accessible," he says.
With a UDA, companies can overcome the data challenges that arise from a mixed data landscape. Its primary function is to balance decentralization and unification by serving as a virtual connector between data sources and destinations.
"There is a growing adoption of a Unified Data Model combined with Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning across the industry worldwide to solve several industry challenges," says Frederico Justus, who leads the company’s Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia and Brazil operations as EVP of the Eastern Hemisphere. "Companies can predict pump failures, identify the best well candidates for reactivation/workover or simply focus on extracting the best of every single existing well."
Datagration's PetroVisor Unified Data Model and its array of specialized applications do precisely that. And oil and gas companies in LatAm benefit from using technologies such as automation and integration augmentation to operate with a network of instantly available information in a single, user-friendly consolidated system.
Datagration's Unified Data Model is the game-changing next step for exploration and production firms. With PetroVisor, operators can hyper-automate data discovery, data governance, and data consumption across a hybrid and multi-cloud data landscape. And by using PetroVisor, companies can improve time-to-value for business users, data engineering and operations productivity, as well as governance and compliance integrity in the long run.
November 21, 2022