Country Brand Index 2011

What makes a strong country brand?

At FutureBrand, we assess the strength of a country brand in much the same way as any other brand. We measure awareness, familiarity, preference, consideration, advocacy and active decisions to visit or interact with a place.
But the most important factors—the aspects that truly differentiate a country brand—are its associations and attributes across five key dimensions: Value System, Quality of Life, Good for Business, Heritage and Culture and Tourism.

A strong country brand is more than the sum of its attributes: in total, it must make people’s lives better.
TheFutureBrand 2011-2012 Country Brand Index is our most comprehensive study of country brands to date. It is based on more respondents across more countries and questions than ever before. After seven years of research, we know that country brand strength is driven by perceptions of heritage and culture, tourism, what it’s like to do business, quality of life and national value systems. But above all, a strong country brand is more than the sum of its attributes: it makes peoples’ lives better.

http://www.futurebrand.com/think/reports-studies/cbi/2011/overview/

Distance:

Typical offshore destinations are normally related with India and other countries in Asia. That means that if you are in the United States, you will need to fly between 20-30 hrs just to get there, depending on where you are based. This also means that you will need to plan to stay there for at least two weeks, to make a reasonable use of your time.
On the other hand, Costa Rica is just a few hours from most of the cities in the US with many daily direct flights from most of them. Costa Rica is just 5 hrs from NY, 2.5 from Florida, 4 from Atlanta and 6 from LA. That means that you can get here one day and leave the next day, if needed, and be back at your office real quick and the ticket price is affordable.

Security:

Many countries have a huge problem of security, kidnapping as Philippines [1] and Mexico [2] and others that you have to consider when you travel. Costa Rica is one of the safest countries in the area, and the safest in Central America [3].

“The crime rate in Costa Rica is very low compared to other countries. For the purpose of comparison, according to the United Nations’ Seventh Annual Survey on Crime, crimes recorded in police statistics show that the crime rate for all index crimes (murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft) in Costa Rica was 1208.2 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1999, comparing very well with 1529.75 for Japan (country with a low crime rate) and 4184.24 for the U.S. (country with a high crime rate)”

“The crime in Costa Rica is generally much lower and less violent than that in the States, and the crime here tends to be opportunistic as opposed to violent. In other words, rapes and murders in Costa Rica are very few, almost unheard of, compared to those in the States, but petty theft, car theft, and pick-pocketing are not uncommon here, especially in downtown San Jose and on the beach. In smaller towns, the crime rate is much lower.”
Article Source:  David Cantrell  http://EzineArticles.com/1670985

Time zone:

One of the main problems for US clients working with offshore providers located in Asia is the time zone difference. We work while they sleep and the other way around. This can be solved with switched shifts, late night calls, or more documentation, but at the end, most of the people that have faced these situations get tired because of the overhead involved.
Costa Rica on the other side is located CST. This means that there are just 1-2 hrs difference with the US, depending on the area where you are located, and the time of the year (because of DST). Why is this important? because you can have real time collaboration all the time, there are no delays answering emails, chat is available, and working sessions are feasible anytime since Costa Rica is in GMT-6.
Communication:

Since software development, and in general terms projects, are a matter of people dealing with people, communication is critical. This is something that goes beyond the right command of the language, and the quality of the phone call. It has to be with you feeling comfortable speaking with someone you can understand and someone that understands what you are saying. It is the “I understand what you mean and what you want. You understand what I mean so we can start working right away, with no delays translating or explaining more than needed. Costa Rica has an affinity with the North American culture so, is very easy to understand the language and the culture.

At the end, the nearshore is a good point to consider and mainly Costa Rica that you could consider just perfect for outsourcing.
Sources:

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1354744.stm

[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/16/eveningnews/main4951080.shtml

[3] http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Safe-is-Costa-Rica?&id=1670985

This list published in the Global Services magazine, ranks San Jose as one of the safest destinations to do business.

Among the reasons are that the most of the population speaks English, it is close to United States, has an excellent infrastructure and offers good incentives for the employees.

The successful expansion of companies as Hewlett Packard, Sykes, Teletech, IBM and several more serves as incentive.

The leader in Central America in terms of attracting new outsourcing service business is Costa Rica, where 24,500 call-center and information technology jobs have been created in the past few years, a number expected to double in the next two years, according to the non-profit Costa Rican Chamber of Information and Communication Technologies. In Latin America as a whole, the number of call-center workstations will hit 730,000 in 2008, up from 336,000 in 2004, according to market researcher Datamonitor.

Other cities in the list are:

2^nd Shanghai, China.

3^rd Beijin, China.

4^th Krakov, Poland.

In 1996 Costa Rica shocked the sourcing world by winning a $300 million deal with Intel to build a new semiconductor plant, against a host of seemingly better qualified countries. That was the beginning for Costa Rica in this field of sourcing and outsourcing. Since then, through coordinated government effort, the ‘new kid on the block’ has become a choice destination for high-end ITO and software development services. Can Costa Rica continue its winning ways or are there major hurdles on the horizon?

One of the reasons that Costa Rica is so ITO-friendly now is that Intel’s decision in 1996 was conditional. The tech giant stipulated that its investment would only materialize if Costa Rica delivered on certain provisions designed to improve the business climate and operating conditions in the country. And there was a deadline. With little time available, the government and CINDE immediately began restructuring the areas that Intel identified, and the result was a Costa Rica that investors more than a decade later are still finding beneficial. Apart from Intel, other large players in Costa Rica include IBM, Boston Scientific, HP, Procter & Gamble, Fujitsu and others in this area.

Some facts and figures on Costa Rica:

• Educational system is ranked highest in Latin America, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2008-2009
• Placed 23^rd in the 2009 AT Kearney Global Services Location Index, and 4^th in Latin America after Chile, Mexico and Brazil.
• Most politically stable country in Latin America according to the World Bank’s Study on Global Governance Indicators 2008.
• GDP is approximately $48.19 billion, and the foreign currency risk rating according to Standard and Poor’s is BB.

The Case for Costa Rica

Proximity – When we say Costa Rica is close to the US, we don’t mean just geographically. Aside from the fact that it shares the Central Time zone and a plane ride from New York to San Jose is less than 5 hours and 2.5 hours from Miami, Costa Rica have a real cultural affinity with the US. The main reason is its thriving eco-tourism industry, which not only created a friendly and welcoming attitude toward US nationals, but also made the Costa Rican population one of the most bilingual in Latin America. That high English proficiency may be the single biggest advantage of Costa Rica over the competition.

Tourism is one of the pillars of the economy; The locals had to learn English to interact with foreigners. A small country like Costa Rica without a self-sustaining economy needs things from outside, so interaction with foreigners is critical. There is the idea that if you learn English, you’re going to get ahead.

Education – Costa Rica’s workforce is also extremely well trained and IT-proficient. The military was abolished in 1948, and since then those resources have been invested in educating the population. Education is mandatory and free until the ninth grade, and strongly emphasizes computer and technology skills. The result is that Costa Rica has one of the highest literacy rates in the American continent (95.8%), and a great value proposition for IT Outsourcing firms.

CINDE

The driving force behind Costa Rica’s attractiveness is CINDE, the private non-profit organization ranked by the World Bank as the best investment promotion agency in Latin America. CINDE upholds that reputation well by the range of services and support it offers companies even before they commit to Costa Rica. If you’re considering investing in Costa Rica, CINDE will arrange a full agenda of meetings with firms already there; with potential providers of services you may need (lawyers, recruiters, tax accountants); and also visits to potential sites you can be located, all at no cost. “CINDE’s vision is to get to the high end of the value chain”, says Juan Carlos Ruiz Coronado, Manager and Outsourcing Advisor at Deloitte. “The objective is to bring revenue to the country, while for other promo agencies it is to create jobs. That’s why CINDE outperforms them”.

In terms of monetary incentives, CINDE has set up a system of Free Trade Zone Industrial Parks which act almost as tax shelters for US firms in Costa Rica. The majority of the parks are in the greater metropolitan area of San Jose, and permission to locate there is through an application process. Requirements for firms to apply are a minimum fixed asset investment of US$ 150,000 and the condition that they must be exporting at least 50% of their services within 36 months. “The application process is relatively short”, says Irving Soto, Investment Promotion Director at CINDE. “A firm must be legally incorporated in Costa Rica which takes four to five weeks, and then application approval takes three months. So in about five months, you would be ready to set up an outsourcing operation in Costa Rica”.

Challenges

Small labor pool – Despite its many advantages, Costa Rica is not a perfect sourcing destination. One criticism we’ve heard over and over is that its workforce (2.1 million) is too small for the multinational IT and BPO market it’s targeting. San Jose with a population of 346,000 is the only city in Costa Rica that can support a decent sized outsourcing operation, as compared to other cities none of which have populations over 70,000. Intel’s operation has around 4,000 workers in Costa Rica, HP has 6,500 and Procter & Gamble has 1,350 – but you need those kinds of hefty resources to attract that talent.

CINDE is working at it though. The education system in Costa Rica has been ramped up and focused on IT, with the creation of one-year technical certificate courses in colleges like the Technological Institute of Costa Rica (ITCR) and the University of Costa Rica. According to Irving Soto, there were 2000 IT and software development graduates in 2009, and that number has been growing at 6.7% since 2001. He also mentions Costa Rica Multilingual, a program that aims at making 100% of the public school graduates bilingual by 2017.

We all know that a small labor pool means increased competition for workers, which drives up wages. Costa Rica is not as cheap as some of its competition. The monthly salary for a Support Technician is $1200, while a Junior Software Developer earns $1500 monthly, including benefits. If you’re looking for a comparison with other LATAM countries, on average Costa Rica would be more expensive than Argentina, but still cheaper than Chile.

Infrastructure and bureaucracy – Costa Rica also faces infrastructure challenges. Access to the telecom system is controlled by government-run firm ICE, which has limited internet service to companies in recent years and caused severe problems. But now because of the DR-CAFTA treaty, Costa Rica is being forced to open the telecom infrastructure to private competition. In 2009 the state monopoly was lifted, and a few US firms were allowed to offer internet services in San Jose. “We expect that by the beginning of 2011 it will be completely open to private companies”, says Soto.

Another concern is the large presence of red tape in Costa Rica’s business environment. The World Bank ranked Costa Rica only 121 out of 183 countries in its 2010 Ease of Doing Business index, as compared to Colombia (37) or Chile (49). In spite of CINDE’s initiatives it can be tedious for companies to get permits to open a local office or export services, which can increase operating costs.

All things considered, Costa Rica has a great value proposition as a sourcing destination. “In the next few years the IT service and BPO sectors will expand”, says Ruiz Coronado from Deloitte, on the future of the country. “Costa Rica has the right building blocks and the right approach to outsourcing. If they continue with that vision, they will be very successful”.

Read complete article: http://www.nearshoreamericas.com/country-profile-identifying-the-real-source-of-costa-ricas-winning-sourcing-strateg/3551/

Other sources:

NBC Costa Rica Review

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OLq9jOR5

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The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) programming model unifies Web Services, .NET Remoting, Distributed Transactions, and Message Queues into a single Service-oriented programming model for a distributed environment. WCF is Microsoft’s implementation of a set of industry standards defining service interactions, type conversion, marshaling, and various protocols’ management. WCF provides developers with the essential off-the-shelf plumbing required by almost any application, and as such, it greatly increases productivity. WCF is part of .NET 3.0 and requires .NET 2.0. It can only run on operative systems like Windows Vista (client and server), Windows XP SP2, and Windows Server 2003 SP1 or their later versions.

In this blog we’ll go through a simple but explanatory application that implements WCF and retrieves a list of customers from a database. We won’t be able to experiment with all the possible features that WCF contains but at least, hopefully, we’ll end up with a clear image and proven concept of the power that encapsulates this technology.

Services ABC

Let’s start with a conceptual explanation of a service. A service is a unit of functionality exposed to the world. A service has at least one endpoint; it also means that it can contain several endpoints. A client normally communicates with one endpoint in a certain service. The picture below shows a service with one endpoint.

ABC Services

1. A stands for Address

In WCF, every service is associated with a unique address. The address provides the location of the service and the transport protocol used to communicate with the service. The messages are independent of transport protocols; that makes it different from Web services, WCF services can communicate over several transports, not just HTTP. These protocols can be any of the following HTTP, TCP, NamedPipes, Peer2Peer, MSMQ. For the purpose of this sample, we’ll use the HTTP protocol.

2. B stands for Binding

A binding tells the client all the things necessary to connect to the service. It is a set of choices regarding the transport protocol, message encoding, communication pattern, reliability, security, transaction management, and interoperability. It is important to know that the binding enables you to use the same service logic over different configuration choices.

WCF provides nine different standard bindings: BasicHttpBinding, NetTcpBinding, NetPeerTcpBinding, NetNamedPipeBinding , WSHttpBinding , WSFederationHttpBinding , WSDualHttpBinding, NetMsmqBinding and MsmqIntegrationBinding . There’s always the chance to write a custom binding from scratch.

For the purpose of this sample we are going to use the WSHttpBinding which uses HTTP or HTTPS for transport, and is designed to offer some features such as reliability, transactions, and security over the Internet.

3. C stands for Contract

The contract is used to specify what your service does. WCF defines four types of contracts: Service contracts, Data contracts, Fault contracts and Message contracts. We’ll see more of this in the following section

Developing a WCF application

We’ll build a WCF application that gets a list of customers from the Northwind SQL Server Sample database. To achieve this we’ll need to define a Data Contract, Service Contract and Service Implementation projects. On the other hand, of course, we will need a host and a client project to see the complete WCF functionality working.

I’m assuming that we already have a Business Entities, Business Logic and Data Access projects.

The picture below shows the three projects used a bridge to get data from the database. Those projects don’t have anything special configured that is related to WCF.

As we already saw, we need an address, binding and contract to complete the WCF ABC. Let’s start defining some contracts.

Defining the contracts

Let’s start with the Data Contract which defines the data types that are passed to and from the service. WCF defines implicit contracts for primitive types such as int and string, but you can easily define explicit data contracts for custom types.

For this application, we’ll define a custom type data contract project. The data contract class is the entity that will travel from the service to the client in a list. We’re not using the business entity already defined because it’s necessary to include some attributes that are part of the WCF framework. We’ll name the class Customer. Notice the [DataContract] attribute in the class definition which specifies that the class defines or implements a data contract and is serialized by the DataContractSelializer which uses the binary format to serialize the XML. Also notice the [DataMember] attribute in the properties which specifies that the member is part of a data contract.

Now, let’s define the Service Contract project. This is an interface that has the needed methods that will be exposed to the world. We add a [ServiceContract] attribute to the interface which indicates that this interface defines a service contract in WCF and then we mark as [OperationContract] the methods that we want to expose indicating that those methods define operations in WCF. It’s important to know that methods are called operations in services.

Finally let’s define the Service Implementation project. This project implements the interface previously defined. Also notice that along with the CustomerManager class implementing the interface, it’s necessary to define a static class that translates from the Customer Data Contract to the real Customer entity and vice versa. This translation is necessary because of the differences between those classes. The downside of this could be the performance penalty incurred in translating a list of entities at one time.

In the end, after defining all those three projects, the solution tree should look like this:

Hosting the service

The host can be provided by IIS, by the Widows Activation Service (WAS) on Windows Vista, or by the developer as part of the application.

Let’s continue defining the WCF ABC. Previously we created the contract, now we’ll define the address and binding letting WCF know what contract belongs to what binding on which address.

In order to configure our host we need to create a new WCF Service Website. After that we have to import the Service Implementation project. Once done, we have to add a section in the web.config named and configure our service telling WCF what service we’ll want to use, where the implementation of the service is. We could configure as many services as we want. We also define one or many behaviors which contain a collection of settings for a service. In this way we could easily change from one behavior to another changing only the configuration file of the host.

Notice there is two endpoints defined. This is because one is for the service and the other is for the Metadata Exchange, that why it’s called MEX.

Consuming the service

To invoke operations on the service, the client first needs to import the service contract. If the client uses WCF, the common way of invoking operations is to use a proxy. The proxy is a CLR class that exposes a single CLR interface representing the service contract. The proxy completely encapsulates every aspect of the service: its location, its implementation technology and runtime platform as well as the communication transport.

Let’s create a Windows Forms Client project and then right click the project and Add a Service Reference then select discover and name it CustomerManager. The picture below shows you how it should look:

Then click OK. You will get the proxy class. Also notice that you will get your application configuration file populated with some settings:

The bindings section defines the communication details that are required to connect to the endpoint of the WCF service. This have to match the one define at the server level.

The endpoint is also specified here and is pointing to where the service is. Again you’ll notice the WCF ABC, address, binding and contract.

In the end, we consume the service instantiating the proxy we just created:

And voila!. We have a working and fully functional WCF application:

Why should you use WCF?

• The serialization of data is greatly improved with the use of the DataContractSerializer.
• WCF services can use multiple protocols and the configuration is done only in the configuration files without the need to rewrite the logic of the service.
• There are new security capabilities provided by WCF such as support for claims-based authorization that provides finer-grained control over resources than role-based security.
• WCF provides exception shielding. When an unhandled exception occurs, the default configuration of WCF protects sensitive data from exposure by not returning sensitive information in SOAP fault messages.
• WCF provides WCF provides extensible objects that can be used for state management other than the default ASP.NET context which by the way has to be enabled with the ASP.NET compatibility mode.

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