Vendor lineage
Prodesp - the state of Sao Paulo, computed
Created in 1969 with two staff and no equipment; now runs the state's network and data centre.
Prodesp was created on 24 July 1969 by state decree and began work that October in a borrowed room at the finance department, with two employees and no equipment. Its first machine, an IBM 360/65 bought for around nine million dollars, ran its first job in July 1970: the payroll of a state government then employing 290,000 people.
The trajectory from there is the whole history of public-sector computing in one company. Fourteen large computers and roughly nine hundred terminals by the early 1980s; regional data-processing centres through the interior as the equipment park more than doubled between 1987 and 1989; identity cards, driving licences and road maintenance all passing through the same organisation.
The 1990s turned it from a data-processing bureau into an IT company, and 1997 produced the thing it is best known for outside the industry: Poupatempo, the one-stop public service centre, whose implementation and administration it took on. Prodesp also ran Acessa Sao Paulo, a digital-inclusion programme recognised in 2013 by the Gates Foundation.
Today it administers Intragov, the state's multiservice IP network, and a data centre among the largest in Latin American public administration. In 2021 it absorbed the Imprensa Oficial do Estado, a 130-year-old institution, which added the official gazette and digital certificate issuance to a company that started with two people and a borrowed desk.