February 2008 Archives

As the initial dust settles on the announcement of SDL's acquisition of Idiom, we noticed a couple of interesting trends -- some anticipated, some surprising, and some just plain troubling.

Expected trends? A steady outcry from the translation community, bemoaning the loss of the "Switzerland" of translation technology. A logical assessment, given that Idiom built an enviable brand as a pure technology provider and posed no threat to neither Language Service Providers (LSP) nor ECM players. OTOH, the neutrality factor left the status quo in place, leaving room for translation and content management players to handle integration needs as partnerships and in some cases, fairly loose integrations. Also expected? Fear-driven reactions inevitable to consolidation in any software segment, summed up by the "what now" debate.

Our take? Consolidation happens. The ECM market has demonstrated it for over 10 years -- the Search and BPMS market are well on their way. The platform players, i.e., the Microsoft, Oracle and IBM's of the world, have eaten more than their share, by some analyst accounts. So, consolidation happens. It is not really "what now?" that's the most important question; rather it is "what's next?" Consolidation is not always positive; it's disruptive, no doubt about it. In addition, technology mergers and acquisitions are notorious for the length of time they take to strategically integrate what's purchased. Some never do. Others have a plan from the get-go.

However, there's room for upstream opportunity and technology metamorphosis within disruption, both of which the translation industry is in need of. By all accounts, this industry is overdue for major change, requiring innovation from technology, service providers, pricing, and from our perspective, "the corporate champions," currently struggling to raise the visibility of globalization as an enterprise priority. We're not ready to predict that this acquisition will bring positive changes to any of these elements. That's for the new product roadmap to lay out -- and our advice to SDL/Idiom would be to tackle this sooner rather than later.

Whose does? Well, THE BUYER, silly. In terms of translation as part of the global content value chain, the documentation world is ripe and I dare say ready, for innovation based on solid knowledge of single sourcing and multichannel strategies. Add the ferocious uptake of DITA over the past 2 years, and you have a situation where a language can be an output rather than an overdue afterthought. Over on the "other side of the house," marketing is still trying to prove the value of geographically-targeted web sites as critical to brand and new revenue. Though these audiences may currently search for different solutions to their problems, they are today's buyers of translation and localization technologies.

Surprising trends? A lack of concern about tomorrow's buyer. You know, the corporate champions who already view globalization as an enterprise mandate, but can't justify an enterprise cost yet. The technology industry would be wise to "get ready," so to speak and by some accounts, they are. According to the BDO Seidman 2008 Technology Outlook Survey, 73% of CFOs at leading U.S. technology businesses expect to post increased sales revenue in 2008 over 2007. Over 39% cited consumer demand for innovative personal technology as the greatest growth driver, closely followed by 32% who cited international expansion as the main driver. Promising, yes. But what about the corporate CIO's? Many corporate champions we talk to still describe cultures that perceive translation and localization as the "black box" at the end of a larger process.

Troubling trends? The lack of response from the large US-based ECM vendors. It would not have been surprising for us -- and we dare say more "savvy" than surprising -- to see an ECM or WCM best-of-breed pick up Idiom. Perhaps SDL understands that value, in light of the Tridion acquisition as well as the Trisoft investment. We've been on the integration bandwagon for some time; there's opportunity to squelch the ad-hoc, siloed approaches to content and translation management as the norm. Trouble is, the "conversation" has yet to rise to a level where a departmental challenge transforms to an enterprise initiative. Consolidation happens. It doesn't mean the end of a market, but its reshaping. From our perspective, the time is right for vendors and users alike to collaboratively define the transformation.

Hewlett-Packard has long been a poster child for the application of people, process, and technology to content globalization solutions. The Gilbane case study on HP documented the company's commitment to satisfying customers in their local langauges. The mandate for multilingual content was made clear by the then-VP of content and product data management: 90% of HP's customers buy based on content, not on touching the product.

The importance of investment in content globalization solutions was driven home once again with HP's announcement of quarterly earnings on Feb 19. Overall, the company posted a 38% increase in earnings and a 13% rise in revenue for its fiscal first quarter. Of note to our readers:

In its first quarter, H-P's results were fueled by strong sales in its personal-computer division and robust sales overseas, particularly in markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. International markets accounted for 69% of H-P's revenue for the quarter.

Put these results together with customer buying patterns.

• 69% of the company's revenues were in markets outside the US.


• 90% of customers buy based content, not on touching the product.

Can there be any more compelling reason to develop a multilingual content strategy? And invest in people, process, and technology to execute against it?

I keep being fascinated about the role of language in social media. I read a very interesting article on multilingual social bookmarking in the Just Landed web site. English is extremely dominant in social bookmarking, although a lot of the English sites also contain bookmarks to non-English sites. Among the non-English sites, German dominates. I also noticed that there are multilingual Indian social bookmarking sites which include several Indian languages.

Is social media actually compartmentalized by languages? Christian Kreutz has an excellent entry in his blog about the multilingual social web. As he says: "So it is a dilemma. On one way English allows us to communicate worldwide, but at the same time it narrows down the potential for collaboration by simply contradicting cultural diversity."

I would guess that more social and customer-generated media will eventually mean more machine translation, because it would be nice to share thoughts over the language barrier. Or I might be quite wrong, and most of the discussions and social sites will actually be quite local, shared by people who already share a language. Language is, after all, more than words: it is also culture and connotations and nuances, some of which are impossible to translate.

It would be interesting to hear from the MT community: do you see increased demand from social media sites?

Integration versus Acquisition, that is. Certainly the latter does not preclude the former. And we expect that it will most certainly not.

SDL and Idiom are making a strategic industry announcement with this move, with both obvious and subtle impacts on both the translation and content management industries. Most obvious is the influence it can have on the impact of integrating workflows, a year-long discussion we've having with the Gilbane community. Bringing more visibility to the Global Content Lifecycle and hopefully, more conversation on adding value throughout is a positive event. Ramifications on the state of content management interoperability, LSP neutrality, and market uptake for Idiom's deep investment in the SaaS approach will be more subtle impacts, which will be important for our community to understand.

We'll keep you posted as always, but note today's facts:

• This is not SDL's first foray into merging the translation and content management technologies, demonstrated by May's Tridion acquisition and the more recent investment in Trisoft, strengthening an already "deep" partnership albeit with no public announcement. Tridion caught the attention of marketing content management professionals; Trisoft should have caught the attention of techcomm content management professionals. Idiom will capture the attention of both.
• As we discussed in Gilbane Boston 2007, organizations that understand the impact of multilingual communications on efficiency, brand, and revenue are moving globalization strategies upstream to "bake in" quality at source content creation. One of my favorite quotes during our Quality at the Source session was from Richard Sikes from the Localization Institute, who reminded our audience that "the whip cracks loudest at the farthest end."
• The acquisition announcement will trigger more conversation on topics included in our 2008 Globalization Wish List, in particular the idea of "closing the gap."