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Common Sense Advisory Blogs
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Vignette Prepares to Leave the Anglo Zone
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Mike Aviles, Vignette's CEO of just 73 days, presented the company's strategy, including its goal of growing its global business. Aviles will rationalize the company's international efforts and develop business plans for each region. We asked what Vignette would do to increase the marketability of the English-only Vignette product line -- in our March 2006 research on global content management, Vignette scored near the bottom of the ECM class in its localized support for non-Anglophone users and administrators.
Vignette's chief executive said it will address its globalization shortfalls on several fronts:
- The company has designated general managers for the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific. These GMs will help Vignette focus its product, marketing, sales, and support efforts by region.
- The Vignette product foundation is internationalized and ready for localization, including double-byte character support for Asia. As we noted in our March 2006 report, Vignette's ECM product can store non-English content; the company execs pointed to Vignette implementations such as the massively multilingual Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) to demonstrate that capability (with Idiom's WorldServer handling translation workflow management). However, Vignette has yet to localize user interfaces for content creators, business users, developers, and administrators in non-Anglo markets.
- By early 2007 the company plans to introduce international French and Spanish variants of its content creator and business user interfaces for its key products, thus providing language-specific dashboards and desktops. The company's SVP of products and strategy said that it would retain English-language interfaces for developers and administrators for its French and Spanish variants, but would review that decision as it adds other languages. This limited approach to localized interfaces reflects a fairly typical failing of software companies that assume they don't need local languages in the server room. However, our research shows that the further south and east you go in Europe, or just about anywhere in non-Anglophone Asia, companies must pay a premium for bilingual development and administrative staff. Cultural issues around content management complicate CMS adoption in Asia.
- Vignette set up an offshore "factory floor" in India, where a staff of 170 complements roughly 70 developers each in Texas and Australia. The U.S. and Australian teams own and develop key products, while the Indian group is responsible for quality assurance, integration, porting, and related support tasks. Over time Vignette plans to globalize the operation even more by transferring ownership of key products to its Indian operations.
Way back in 1999 and 2000 Vignette was a global-thinking web content management supplier, inking relationships with globalization software suppliers such as Idiom and GlobalSight. However, market weakness from 2001 through 2004 derailed a lot of Vignette's more ambitious plans -- along with those of many of its competitors. After the successful turnarond effort of its last CEO, Vignette has a strong cash flow, money in the bank, and a revived interest in supporting global markets. Customer demand for its non-Anglophone ECM products will determine how quickly the company moves to catch up with some of its more global rivals.
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