Richard Faubert, Brian Shorey, Martin Güttinger and Nancy Rice
share their views during Cisco Day at the LISA Forum USA

Here’s what these high-tech companies had to say, loud and clear:

If you’re an Idiom WorldServer user, start planning your migration NOW!

It’s time to partner together and share what we’ve built around the Idiom ecosystem

The consensus? Stick with what you have for the short-term. All of the panelists felt that they would be in good shape for the next 1.5 to two years with WorldServer. And, at the same time, since SDL has made it very clear that it will only support .NET going forward, their advice was to start planning for your transition vis-à-vis technology, workflow and retraining NOW.

Since everyone on the panel, along with Cisco, develops software in some fashion, they also underscored how critical standards are to this sector. Since Idiom has been a strong supporter of standards (and an active member of OSCAR – LISA’s open standards body), the Idiom WorldServer user community will be able to migrate their data to whatever future platform supports OSCAR standards.

Here are specific comments from the panelists:

On how the acquisition was handled (in a nutshell!):

“We’ll adapt, since we have to.”

“We were frankly very shocked that Idiom was acquired by SDL. It’s always a very bad sign when you inform your major customers of a major acquisition and platform change [i.e., to .NET] through a press release.”

On their original WorldServer implementations:

“We were extremely pleased with our initial WorldServer implementation – the ROI was very straightforward, and it has truly enabled us to build a very open, productive and collaborative ecosystem that answers the needs of our service providers, our translators and ourselves.”

“Our payback after implementing Idiom WorldServer was virtually immediate, starting with our providers who had to standardize their billing. That saved us 25% of our localization spend right there.”

“We have 450 products, many of which are platforms in their own right. So, we have highly customized our WorldServer solution – it’s basically a “black octopus behind the firewall.” There are now about 300 internal people in globalization who use it and about 800 external people who access it. It can’t handle our software localization, but it meets our web and doc needs very well.”

“Our original integration with WorldServer a couple of years ago was painful, but we’re very happy now with our implementation. The combination of the Idiom SDK (software developer’s kit) with our homegrown tools on top serve us well for our web globalization needs.”

“We had hoped that our original solution would work right out-of-the-box to support both localization and internationalization. What we found was that WorldServer wasn’t a “silver bullet” for our localization needs, but it has enabled us to decrease our 26 manual steps to just 3, which was a major goal.”

On their options in the post-Idiom world:

Our focus should be on (1) partnering to support the Idiom ecosystem and (2) computing our TCO

“Why not partner together and share what we’ve developed as part of the Idiom WorldServer ecosystem? What keeps us from developing some “bidirectionality,” similar to what exists in the ERP world?”

“We started out with Uniscape 10 years ago, before it was bought by TRADOS and then integrated into SDL. We’re migrating to TMS right now. Our internal product teams are not required to use the platform, but our evangelization efforts have been so successful that upper-level executives are now ready to move large amounts of content to this platform. However, all of their teams already have their own processes and service providers. Our questions now center around whether our solution will scale in terms of people (support staff) and the technology itself.”

“As with any platform or software solution, all of us need to focus on our TCO (total cost of ownership) as we go forward. What will it cost to migrate now? To migrate later?”

“Since .NET will not help us at all, we are seriously considering open source options to enable us to move forward.”

The lessons in all of this?

Technical standards are your ticket to portability for your technology and workflow

Business process standards are your ticket to portability for people

Send me an email at Rebecca@lisa.org if you’re interested in joining forces with the North America Idiom WorldServer Users Group to identify your best options in the post-Idiom world.