MEXICO CITY -- Marinated pork meat is always roasting temptingly on a spit at El Fogoncito, a chain of trendy taco shops in Mexico City.
"Tacos al Pastor," made from the roasted pork, are the specialty at these fast-food outlets, where customers typically order seconds and thirds while waiters tap the orders into laptop computers that track the bill and the store's sales.

Owner Carlos Roberts started the chain four years ago and lost no time in marrying tacos to technology.
From his CENTROtown office, Roberts can log onto a computer network connecting his 17 restaurants and audit any store's activity CENTRO to monitoring orders as they are placed.
He does it all with Arizona-bred technology.
Roberts uses computer networking software by Artisoft, a Tucson-based company that sold $2 million worth of computer products in Mexico in 1995.
"Mexico accounts for 30 to 33 percent of our Latin American sales and it is a very, very important operation for us," says Abelino "Al" Ochoa, Artisoft's Latin America director.

Founded in 1987, Artisoft has mushroomed into a $61 million-a-year company with 371 employees and offices in nine countries, including Mexico.
"Our company manufactures software to connect computers together to form a network that can share resources, such as printers, modems and phone lines," Ochoa explains.
The star product in the Artisoft line is a networking program called LANtastic that was developed for the needs and budget of small- to mid-size businesses.

It is LANtastic that has helped Artisoft become a leader in Mexico for networking software.
Carlos Camargo, director of Abscisa Sistemas, a Mexico City computer-equipment retailer, helped introduce LANtastic to Mexico in 1991, a year before Artisoft opened its Mexico City office.
"We sought out Artisoft, which had not thought about entry to Mexico, and asked to sell their product," Camargo said.
At that time, Mexican computer aficionados bent on using LANtastic had to buy it in the United States. Roberts did this only to find that the English-language version would crash every time a Spanish-alphabet character was entered.
Because Artisoft was not in Mexico, there were no customer-service or computer technicians available to help customers such as Roberts with trouble-shooting.

All of that changed with Artisoft's entry into Mexico in 1992. Today, there are Spanish versions of LANtastic with Spanish-language user manuals. Artisoft also has an office in Mexico City that provides sales, marketing and technical support in addition to a web of distributors and retailers with trained technicians.

Camargo says he now has more than 260 customers using LANtastic as well as other Artisoft products. "The majority are companies with 50 or fewer employees," he said. "We have schools, factories, car dealers and restaurants."
Some Artisoft customers in Mexico break the mold. The national Fishing Ministry and the Finance Ministry in the state of Oaxaca also are LANtastic users.

Throughout Mexico, an average of 12,000 computers annually or 1,000 per month are being outfitted with LANtastic, Ochoa said.
"The Mexican market is not saturated with computers. It's a growing market and a market for the future," Ochoa said.
Hopes for the future kept Artisoft from pulling out of Mexico last year when, after two years of climbing, sales plunged. The drop-off followed the devaluation of the peso and a drop in software prices.
"We had a lot of inventory, and the customers couldn't pay for it," he said. To avoid closing shop, Artisoft took drastic steps to cut the company's losses. The Mexico City office staff was pared to six from 12, and Artisoft wrote off half of every customer's debt in exchange for 50 percent payment.
"We were able to stop the bleeding immediately and balance the inventory that we had in Mexico," Ochoa said. In April, the Mexican recovery started for Artisoft.

"Now we're growing again," Ochoa said.
Artisoft's Mexico City office now offers support for sales in the rest of Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Uruguay and Ecuador.
In 1995, Latin American sales accounted for almost $6 million of Artisoft's total receipts, Ochoa said.
The company foresees a 25 percent increase this year in Mexican sales, with more growth to follow the introduction this month of computer telephony programs.

The new software will function much like online telephone banking, giving small businesses the ability to let their customers call into the company's computer and place orders, leave messages or check their accounts.
"There is a big future for us in the Mexican market," Ochoa said.

  

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