Virtus is born from the merger of seven companies
Valor Econômico - 03/07/2008
On a Saturday in February, Maurício Fernandes sat down in front of a wine goblet, took his Latin dictionary off the shelf and started reading the entries, one by one, starting in the letter "a". He only stopped at letter "v", when he came across what he was looking for: a name he considered strong enough to name the union of seven Brazilian Information Technology companies - including Dedalus, of which he is one of the founders - into one single group. Baptized Virtus - the Latin word for courage, virtuosity and strength - the new company was announced yesterday, but it started being developed in the middle of last year, in the meetings of the Board of Directors of another one of its constituting companies: Automatos. "We started talking about consolidation and we noticed that that was the way", said André Fonseca, appointed for the presidency of Virtus. The consolidation is an increasingly intense trend in the Brazilian IT market. What makes the Virtus movement different is that, this time, seven medium-sized companies - Biosalc, Intelekto, Trellis, Visionnaire and Volans, besides Automatos and Dedalus - have decided to join, undertaking similar participation in the resulting group. It is quite a different model if compared to the traditional one, in which the big fish simply swallows the smaller. Virtus was born with 800 employees and a portfolio of nearly one thousand clients, including heavy weights such as Bradesco, Itaú, Vivo, Oi, Carrefour, Nestlé, and Embraer. Together, the income of the seven companies in 2007 was nearly R$ 70 million (US$ 39.8 million), declares Fonseca. The shareholding includes the partners of the grouped companies, in addition to Intel Capital - a venture capital branch of the American microchips giant -; to IdeiasNet, an IT business investment company; and to the SPTech fund. The three last ones already held interest in some of the companies jointed to Virtus. Most of the companies are headquartered in São Paulo (SP), but development centers will be maintained in Curitiba (PR), where the current laboratories of Visionnaire are located, and in Petrópolis (RJ), where is located the product development center of Automatos. The facilities of Biosalc aimed at the agro industry, located in Ribeirão Preto (SP), will also be maintained. The names of the original companies start, automatically, naming its products. Although it starts covering several activities, the core of the businesses will be the software area. Among its rivals, says the officer, there are multinational corporations such as IBM and CA. Until the end of the year, the expectation of the Board of Directors of Virtus is that other companies will join the group. The areas of interest include safety, network engineering, software quality analysis, and infrastructure for digital TV.