SAN JOSE – Costa Rica has once again proved herself as an important destination for foreign investment, particularly in technology. The human capital and the government’s initiatives to train professionals to work in the tech industry are attracting businesses to this sector.

On Thursday, May 10, President Laura Chinchilla maintained that during her next two years in office she will keep supporting young people who choose to follow career paths centered on high technology and innovation. She also mentioned that teaching English as a foreign language will continue to be one of the priorities in all educational curricula around the nation.

“We can’t waste any time, we must train the staff that is needed, we must entice our youth towards these kinds of careers, and we must provide training from an institutional standpoint. Not only do we have to evaluate our success in the amount of foreign investment we attract, but also the quality of those investments. In the last two years Costa Rica has been able to increase tourism revenues precisely due to the expansion of high technology.”

Such were the remarks of our President at the inauguration of the new IBM Technology Services Center, located in the American Free Trade Zone in Heredia. This is an investment of $300 million, and it is estimated to produce 1,000 new jobs for qualified applicants in the next two years.

President Chinchilla also remarked on the fact that IBM and other companies in this sector will enjoy strong measures of protection of their data and intellectual property thanks to government initiatives and rulemaking.

“I will never tire of telling investors that Costa Rica is a fertile ground to host sophisticated operations, and will always remind them that the talent and skill of our people makes the difference. We have always imposed difficult goals on ourselves, and we have achieved them.”

The Ministry of Science and Technology (MICIT in Spanish) informed the public that the new IBM center will provide cloud computing infrastructure solutions such as Platform as a Service (PasS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). This is part of the new paradigm in business computing, which promises to make virtualization a new standard and to drastically reduce costs at the enterprise level.

Along with President Chinchilla, Ministers Alejandro Cruz (MICIT) and Anabel Flores from Foreign Trade were on hand at the inauguration, in which James Rutledge, Vice President of Strategic Outsourcing Services at IBM was also present, as well as Pat Romero Cronin, IBM’s Global Services General Manager.

Sources: Casa Presidencial and MICIT