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Article Details
Global Watchtower
Common Sense Advisory Blogs
XyEnterprise, SDL Team to Offer Comprehensive Content and Translation Management Solution
Posted by Donald A. DePalma on May 25, 2005  in the following blogs: Translation and Localization, Web Globalization, Business Globalization, Technology, Interpreting, Market Data, Global Marketing, Best Practices, Supplier Business Issues
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XyEnterprise is a longtime player in the structured content management business. Its Content@ product manages content as reusable components under full workflow control. The company positions its Content@ integration with SDL's TMS as a workflow hand-off.

This strikes us as the right balance between CMS and translation workflow management. Content@ tracks the impact of changes to source content and pushes affected language variants to SDL's TMS. Product integration allows for real-time feedback, version control, and status checks on content throughout the workflow of source and derived components. The net result is a closed-loop repository of source and transformed content -- without any orphaned translations.

Another thing that struck us about this announcement is that XyEnterprise has gone further than many CMS vendors in acknowledging its responsibility for managing content other than English. While positioning about its global enterprise support is not front and center on its home page or even in its description of Content@, site searches of "translation" and "localization" bring up success stories with companies such as Tweddle, Kohler, and Sun. XyEnterprise is aware that enterprise content management (ECM) must extend to the global enterprise, but it has not yet propagated the message throughout its marketing materials.

Three things could make this relationship stand out: 1) Documenting the tightness, quality, and well-supported nature of the integration through more success stories; 2) establishing a realistic price point that reflects the fact that translation is critical but "just" a workflow step in an overall global content value chain; and 3) taking a page from the automotive handbook and downplaying SDL as the OEM supplier of the translation component -- to wit, GM doesn't have an SKU for the "Chevrolet Corvette with Recaro Seats" or the "Cadillac CTS-V with Getrag Shifter."

As we have noted before, SDL is a two-headed company selling both technology and language services to an often uncomfortable language service provider market. If it were the silent partner of XyEnterprise in a renamed "Content@ Translation Solution," SDL's tools division could become an OEM hero -- and set a pattern for working with other CMS software vendors. For its own marketing, SDL as OEM could pitch "SDL Inside" or "Global by SDL" in deals with leading CMS solutions.

 

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