Vendor lineage
Penso - a million mailboxes and an early provider behind it
Brazilian IT services company founded 2003, whose founders helped create one of the country’s first internet providers.
Penso Tecnologia is a Sao Paulo services company founded in 2003, now working in cloud, corporate email and collaboration, backup and disaster recovery. Its founders had earlier taken part in creating STI Internet, one of the first Brazilian providers after the service was opened to commercial use.
That earlier involvement is the part that places it on this timeline. The people who built the first commercial internet access in Brazil did not stop working when that phase ended; they started the next companies, and the connection between the mid-1990s arrival of the commercial internet and the services market that followed runs through individuals rather than through institutions.
The business it grew into is unusual in one respect worth recording. It manages more than a million corporate mailboxes, built substantially on Zimbra and consolidated through acquisitions - a national email and collaboration practice at a moment when almost every organisation of that size had moved to one of two American suites instead. Somebody has to run the alternative, and there is more of it than the market narrative suggests.
Two numbers from its own account describe the services model better than any description of it: around sixteen hundred clients, and an average client relationship of about eight years. In a market where the technology is replaced every few years, the relationship outlasts almost everything installed under it.
- TI Inside, March 2026 - the company’s history goes back to the 1990s, when its founders took part in the creation of the provider STI Internet, one of the first in Brazil after the service was released for commercial use; it serves around 1,600 clients, focused on organisations with annual revenue between R$100 million and R$500 million, with an average client relationship of about eight years; it operates across five Tier III data centres in different regions and from different suppliers, and its disaster recovery offering is built on Veeam
- Penso Tecnologia - the company’s own tenth-anniversary post: Penso was founded in 2003 as an information technology services provider, beginning with support for small companies and differentiating itself by going deep into each client’s activity, becoming specialists not only in technology but in each client’s kind of business; it later repositioned as a cloud computing specialist
- Company profile - Penso acquired Inova Tecnologias, one of the largest global Zimbra partners, its second acquisition in eighteen months, consolidating its position in corporate email and collaboration with more than one million corporate mailboxes under management; internal practice includes a monthly technical and behavioural training programme