Kelly told us his globalization epiphany came with a professional services engagement for a website in 4 languages. His team considered the usual CMS suspects, then cobbled together its own solution with Trados TeamWorks and local language service provider ACCU to do the translation. As he dug deeper into the application requirements, Kelly saw an opportunity for a mid-tier CMS that can manage multiple languages, was open to integration with translation workflow management software from various suppliers, and could be tied into and easily used by LSPs so customers got translated content out the other end. Productization accelerated when "the big merger mania sucked technology out of the mid-tier and concerned people."

Kelly felt that translation workflow for a multilingual CMS should cost something like US$50,000, not the US$250,000 that was the going price until Idiom lowered its license fee earlier this week. As he worked on his own pricing model, he encountered a problem we have seen in our research -- most customers measure workflow savings as soft cost benefits, such as opening new markets, not missing deadlines, not losing content, increasing security, and so on. These are hard to quantify, especially for the typical content-generating organization that doesn't know what it costs to create source content and keeps close tabs on every penny of translation spend, but does not measure sell-through or any other business metrics resulting from localized websites or other marketing collateral.

With just a few deployments and a small team of 10, Clay Tablet finds itself competing with mainstream CMS providers, system integrators, LSPs with their own translation workflow, Idiom, and SDL. However, customer success stories, the right price points, more technology in the pipeline, and demonstrably fast implementations should get Clay Tablet a hearing as medium-sized businesses begin to think about multilingual websites. More importantly, its appearance on the scene is an encouraging sign of growing innovation and competition in the formerly placid world of globalization-enabling software.