By Cristina Molina 

The Latin American division of Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) expects countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Chile, as well as Central America and the Caribbean, to drive growth in the region this year, Sun Latin America sales operations VP Miguel Martínez told BNamericas.

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According to the executive, for the past three years Latin America has grown at double digit rates for the company, with Brazil showing 20% growth in 1Q08 compared to the previous year.

Following the corporation's guidelines, Martínez said the Latin American division is also focusing on three core areas this year, as a way to increase the company's profitability, which has been hit in the past quarters by IT investment decreases in the US.

These three areas include the promotion of open source platforms - boosted by the recent acquisition of open source database solutions developer MySQL - as well as innovation and services.

"Particularly in Latin America, one of the strategies is to position Sun's open technologies among governments, which have been very attracted by open source, and also in the private segment," Martínez said.

The executive said the relevance of services to sales is higher compared to the global average. Martínez said the reason for this relevance is both the focus regional management has set on this issue - particularly in some markets such as Brazil, Argentina and Chile - and market characteristics.

"Although Latin America is considered an emerging market, I see some countries behaving like mature markets. I would say some years ago some Latin American countries invested in infrastructure. So even though there are opportunities to continue expanding in infrastructure, some sectors have moved on faster and are now demanding a more sophisticated level of services over a well installed infrastructure," he added.

Martínez also sees an interesting opportunity for Sun among Latin American governments that still need to invest in order to update their IT infrastructure and will also continue investing in digital inclusion programs.