Pierre Cadieux, President, i18N Inc.

"At last, something happens! The story in our industry has often been the same: we need to stop pricing by the word, we need to define a better value proposition visible at the C-level, we need to get out of the basement and move up the food chain. Be it recently at the Canadian Language Industry symposium, or 10 years ago at LISA... the same story seems to drag on and on.

"But now something has happened, and it happened in our industry. It is significant that UNISCAPE merged with TRADOS rather than with a CMS vendor such as Vignette. It keeps the complex problem of localization workflow firmly inside the grasp of the localization industry, rather than being diluted somewhere else. This high-profile merging of industry leaders justifies language technology which has often been undervalued and underdeveloped.

"Some may worry that this will signal a technology monopoly. At present this is secondary, because the real problem in our industry is not lack of openness (e.g. TRADOS vs. TMX) but rather lack of technology.

"This merger lends extra credibility to the 'integrated globalization solutions' market in which SDL and STAR are already present. While TRADOS and UNISCAPE are busy integrating, SDL and STAR will likely improve their technology and market it more aggressively. Worry not about the technology monopoly, rather embrace the technology race! The net result should be a bigger, healthier market for all.

"What will the other GMS vendors do? Consider the table below, which very summarily describes the offerings of some of the players relative to the 'multilingual content development food chain':

"The most likely options for GMS vendors are to merge with CMS vendors and/or with vendors of desktop translation tools. IDIOM already has a relationship with Atril which they may strengthen, and they have also produced a version of WorldServer for Vignette; technologically, the merge is already partially done. Similarly, GlobalSight have always been tightly integrated with Interwoven. However, as far as desktop translation tools are concerned, GlobalSight must now weigh carefully their strategy. System 4 supports both TRADOS and Déjà Vu, but these tools now belong to, or are in bed with, their competition. Will GlobalSight be able to offer the same depth of integration that their competitors will? Convey, who have been relying on TRADOS as desktop tool, have a similar strategic issue.

"Finally, I see 'enterprise translation memory' as the one area that will benefit soonest from the effects of this merger."

Mark Homnack, Founder & CEO, Simultrans

"'Just as predicted,' was my first reaction to the Trados-Uniscape merger news.

"LISA members will remember that I foresaw this kind of result 1.5 years ago while speaking on a LISA panel in San Jose. At this conference, I said, 'Within a year or two, half the companies on this panel will have disappeared.'

"Uniscape and Trados (and AlpNet) appeared at this panel. The audience greeted my prediction - bold at the time - with applause, but some of the panelists took offense. You can see the response of one company's panelist in this letter sent to LISA."

Mark Lancaster, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, SDL International

Is this a major step forward in the industry's capacity to build a global localization platform?

It will be interesting to see how a legacy desktop client based product will fit in with a relatively unproven server product. At SDL, we have been providing integrated global solutions of TM, MT, WorkFlow and WebFlow for 2 years. I know it took us 3 years to integrate desktop and server technologies. Typically the complexities of integrating products are much more significant than one thinks, and an integrated solution is what the industry can make the best use of.

Trados as the industry-uniting standard?

SDL has already been working towards this for 4 years, and we fully support the open standard TMX set by LISA. Trados have not supported open standards, they have done their best to lock out others in the TM market and their product is 75% more expensive than SDLX.

Is there a large market for localization products?

In the current climate and still-evolving localization products market, I would not want to be selling products alone; they do not provide a valid business model at this time. In our view, it is customers' needs that are important - a unique combination services and technology solutions bundled into an integrated package that fits their needs. This might involve a lot of technology or only a little.

We started off selling an enterprise product 2 years ago, using a separate sales force to do so, and like our competitors we sold very little. There were a number of reasons for this - market not ready, the state of the economy and above all the fact that people selling the product had not been in localization for years and did not understand the issues.

We now sell our products through our service sales force, who understand the issues and force our developers, and not the customer, to fix the problems. This works for the customer, and the price is part of the deal.

Hanspeter Siegrist, President & CEO, The STAR Group

"For many years, STAR has been an advocate of enterprise workflow solutions. They are the next step in building value propositions for this industry. The market is ready and clients are receptive. The increasing demand for enterprise content management solutions calls for an equivalent solution on the localization side. In recent years, STAR has successfully deployed its TWS and Proactive globalization management systems (GMS) at a number of Global 500 client sites. These GMS solutions provide the functionality necessary to link the worlds of content creation, localization and publishing and enable the automation of processes that were traditionally performed manually by project managers. It will be interesting to see how Trados succeeds in building a competitive solution."

John Freivalds, President, JFA International

"Believe it or not when I heard of the Trados-Uniscape merger, I thought of Jamaica and Grace Kennedy, a Jamaican trading firm I used to be in business with. Since Jamaica's economy was not growing at the time, the only way to expand was to buy into totally new businesses on the island. So Grace Kennedy ended up in just about every aspect of the island economy.

"Our localization island is also small and it is hard to grow outside of it - so you grow within it. Trados had a lot of cash, is a well-run company, and knows the localization game. What will be interesting to plot is how this new entity positions itself within the island and then to the rest of the world.

"I think this merger also means the many of the initial investors in this business want to start seeing results and have realized that there was no holy grail in this business in the first place - no magic wand to make translations automatic (or maybe even disappear). Trados began with a simple principle - make the translators' job easier.

"Given that we are in an age of simplicity and common sense, I see investors looking at the old traditional translation houses and technology to see what jewel lies beneath. Throwing money at a problem and hoping you can come up with a new solution is out for the time being.

"The real value for growth in this business is what was there all along"

Daniel Grasmick, Development Manager, MultiLingual Technology, SAP

"Considering Trados' market dominance in the translation technology area this merger is probably one of the few possibilities available to the company to grow more quickly. Key to the success of the new company will be the development of not only open (TMX, TBX/OLIF) and scalable solutions, but also solid individual components that can be easily integrated into existing or new environments. Needless to say, both approaches need to be affordable, judging by the current challenging market."

Jaap van der Meer, Consultant

"This makes perfect sense for the industry at large. Customers want a choice when it comes to service providers and they will continue to work with multiple translation companies. But they do not want to work with multiple tools and software packages for translation productivity enhancement, workflow management and procurement of translation suppliers. Consolidation on the service side of the industry will be reversed. We will see that large customers will return to using more service vendors (instead of less) in search of better quality at lower cost. Standards and common software platforms will accelerate this evolution. That's why consolidation on the software side of the translation market makes perfect sense. And TRADOS is best positioned to make this happen.

"The localization industry, often referred to as a cottage industry because of its fragmentation and multitude of small players, will not mature through the consolidation on the service side. On the contrary: the incompatible proprietary technologies from the large service providers have added to the complexity and fragmentation. It is now time for a new wave, and TRADOS is making the first step with the announcement of this deal.

"A common translation technology platform, independent from translation service providers, will really help customers to speed up the translation process and cut out cost while continuing to work with their trusted quality translation suppliers.

"I am sure we will see more announcements coming from TRADOS on their way to build the enterprise solution for translation and globalization management. Important features still missing are collaboration workflow and machine translation."

Don DePalma, Ph.D., Common Sense Advisory

"By 'merging' with Uniscape, Trados will accelerate consolidation in an industry that desperately needs it. Long the bastion of mostly small- and some medium-sized enterprises, the translation technology and service industry has had a difficult time both communicating its value proposition and becoming a strategic marketing and development partner to its customers. In this context, the Trados-Uniscape merger was inevitable.

• Like most suppliers of single-user software tools, Trados saw that it must become more strategic to its customers, lest its standalone offerings be marginalized by other technology or service solutions. Trados decided that the quickest path up the enterprise food chain was to buy rather than build. In today's challenging market, Trados had its pick of the litter and felt that Uniscape's multi-user, server-based translation workflow backbone most closely met its needs.
• Over the last several years, Uniscape has worked through several business plans. Each time the company came to realize that it lacked both the scale as an enterprise supplier and the comprehensible product needed to get its foot into many corporate doors. Like its globalization management brethren Idiom and Global Sight, Uniscape's recent focus on linguistic tools has put it on a collision course with translation tool suppliers like Trados. Finally, like many small companies struggling to take off in an uncooperative market, it was running out of runway.

"On balance, the Trados-Uniscape merger promises to deliver a much more compelling solution than either company could produce on its own. This is not to say that success is a slam-dunk. CEO Dev Ganesan and his team have their work cut out for them integrating the companies' staff and cultures; producing a convincing marketing message in a dismal market; merging products without disrupting current users; developing a roadmap for future development that addresses a broader range of international business issues; convincing Trados's current corporate users to move to a shared platform solution; and winning over wary localization and translation service providers.

"The merger will also drive some fundamental changes in the localization and translation industry. Trados becomes a one-stop translation technology shop, allowing corporate buyers to scale without having to change vendors. To remain competitive, other translation tools, localization suites, and globalization management systems will have to bulk up, partner much more aggressively, or most likely search for a white knight. While that necessity might not look very appealing to them right now, Trados's acquisition of Uniscape may alert long-hesitant suitors in other market segments (content management, databases, or enterprise portals) to the fact that it's time to make their move. Combined with the Bowne-led consolidation in the services sector, the new Trados will shake up this industry."

Yves Champollion, Director, WordFast

"I sincerely wish good luck to the newlyweds.

"The localization software industry is a fast-paced industry, where small structures can easily adapt to and meet new challenges. Let us wish the new conglomerate keeps the capacity to react creatively and swiftly to the needs of the market."

Joe Prang, Mentor Capital Group LLC

"This combination has the inside track on being the 800 lb gorilla in the globalization software market. By managing language assets from the desktop to the enterprise, the new Trados can deliver tremendous benefits to global entities."