Vendor lineage
Microsiga - the bet that microcomputers would replace mainframes
Brazilian business-software company founded in 1983, renamed TOTVS in 2005.
Microsiga was founded in 1983 by Laercio Cosentino, then 23 and a director at the data-processing company Siga, and Siga’s founder Ernesto Haberkorn. It wrote management software for small and medium-sized businesses, merged with Siga in 1989, and was renamed TOTVS in 2005.
The founding proposition is the part worth recording, because it was a minority position at the time. Haberkorn’s account is that Cosentino proposed the company over lunch, betting on microcomputers when - in his own words - almost nobody believed they would replace mainframes. Siga’s business was providing computing services to companies that did not own a computer; Microsiga was a bet that they soon would.
What it did with that bet is the second half. The decade that followed brought growth through a franchise network and expansion into Argentina and Mexico, which is an unusual distribution model for enterprise software and a very effective one in a country of that size: franchisees carried the local relationships and the implementation work that a central company could not staff.
The name survives in two places. Protheus, the ERP that leads the Brazilian market, traces to it, and microsiga.com.br is still a live site. A note on dates: sources for Siga’s own founding differ, giving both 1969 and 1974, and neither is settled here.
- TOTVS (Wikipedia): in 1983 Laercio Cosentino, aged 23 and director of the data-processing company Siga created by Ernesto Haberkorn, opened Microsiga with him as equal partners, a software company for small and medium-sized businesses; Microsiga merged with Siga in 1989 and the company was renamed TOTVS in 2005
- Diario do Comercio, 2016 - interview with Ernesto Haberkorn: Cosentino proposed the new company over lunch, betting on the microcomputer market when “almost nobody believed they would replace mainframes”; the following decade brought growth through a franchise network and expansion into Argentina and Mexico
- FGV, GVcasos - the Totvs case: Microsiga acquired the Mexican firm Sipros in 2003; in 2005 BNDES participation enabled the acquisition of Logocenter, and the name TOTVS derives from the Latin for “all” or “everything”
- microsiga.com.br - the name is still live, tying Microsiga to Protheus, TOTVS’s ERP