GALA Blog

We are now just three months away from GALA 2009 and it seems that every day brings something new for this “must do” event. GALA is committed to building bridges and reaching out to our many friends and associates across the industry. For this first year, our board of directors has voted to extend our member discount to members of several associations, such as AILIA, ALC, ELIA, and LISA, to name a few (a savings of US$300 off the non-member registration fee). If you add that savings to the early bird discount offered by registering before 15 July, you will save an additional US$200. (That is a total savings of US$500, which will go a long way towards purchasing your airline ticket to join us!)

If you haven’t taken a peek at our event Web site in the last week or so, we invite you to take another look soon. Our program is coming online and we are adding detailed descriptions every week. Of particular interest is the recent announcement of Craig Newmark as our opening speaker. Founder of Craigslist, Newmark grew a simple e-mail exchange service to one of the top 10 Internet companies in the world.

We certainly want you to join us in Cancun, and I urge you to register soon to take advantage of the incredible hotel rate we have negotiated at the JW Marriott (ocean front rooms for the super rate of US$149 a night when you use the GALGALA code). Special thanks to our GALA 2009 program committee and board members for helping to make this event happen.

In addition to building this new event, our staff and volunteers are hard at work continuing to build other benefits for our membership. As part of continuing efforts to develop more visibility for our industry, GALA has hired the services of Digit4 in the UK and eloquenza PR in Germany to share information about our industry with targeted audiences. We are working to show how globalization and localization are a critical part of the business process for every enterprise operating internationally. GALA members are a key part of this initiative, and we rely on their expertise and active participation with media in telling the story of our industry.

I would like to tip my hat to our program committee for the Localization Forum at tcworld. Volunteers Don DePalma (Common Sense Advisory), Matthias Caesar (Locatech), Véronique Ozkaya (Moravia Worldwide), Massimo Ghislandi (SDL), and Janaina Wittner (WHP) have been hard at work preparing the localization section of the tekom program for later this year.

For those of you who are new to GALA, I encourage you to consider membership for your company. GALA membership is a passport to knowledge and value in the industry, offering a rich variety of market knowledge, networking, products and services. Member companies showcase their company’s talents in the Language Technology & Services Directory, our top destination on the GALA Web site after the home page. Another popular benefit of membership is our GALA Webinar series: staff of member companies and members’ clients attend for free. Members also have access to the results of GALA’s quarterly Member Pulse surveys, which cover relevant and timely topics. Become a member of GALA today to enjoy these and other great benefits!

Stay tuned for more announcements and activities at GALA in the coming months, including the re-launch of gala-global.org, new webinars and more.

Social networks are the rage — nothing new there. In fact, two-thirds of online users access ‘member communities,’ which include social networks and blogs, according to research conducted this year by The Nielsen Company. They have even overtaken email as the fourth most popular online category, and they are growing twice as fast as any other category.
But are these sites just fun, and a great way to procrastinate, or are they useful in business? How are they being used in our world of languages and localization?

It turns out that the fifth most visited social network internationally, LinkedIn, is the most popular spot for localization professionals. As the ‘localization’ of LinkedIn continues (it is currently the most popular professional network in Europe with more than five million users and is available in several European languages, but it is not heavily used in Asia yet), so does its popularity among localization professionals. It is fast becoming the most popular place to post language/localization news, ask questions, discuss industry trends and conduct surveys.

A lot of the LinkedIn activity in our industry is through industry groups. A few of the most active networks are The Localization Professional, managed by Serge Gladkoff, with more than 3,000 members; the Localization and Globalization Fusion Society, managed by Common Sense Advisory, with more than 1,000 members; and, the Globalization and Localization Association’s new discussion group that already has almost 900 members http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=64313&trk=hb_side_g. All of these, as well as many others, can be found by conducting a search of LinkedIn groups (through the search field on any LinkedIn page).

Once you’ve joined some networks, you can display your industry knowledge by participating in some of the discussions. You can post news to all members of the group’maybe a new report you’ve conducted, or an article you’ve published (always provide the link). Recently I posted a question about RFPs in the localization industry. The answers I received helped immensely as I wrote questions on RFPs for an upcoming survey from GALA.

While these groups in LinkedIn and other social networks definitely build connections and help you with your job, the lingering question is value per minute. They can be quite time consuming’and a lot more fun than other work! The trick is to make sure the percentage of time spent on the networks is comparable to their value and not detracting from other critical business functions you perform. I’m still trying to strike that balance’anyone out there have it figured out?

By Gary Prioste
VP, Technology Services
Welocalize

Gary Prioste, VP of Technology Services at Welocalize, comments on the Common Sense Advisory post “Industry Dreams of Open-Source TMS.” Is an open source TMS only a lofty dream? Get his thoughts on how GlobalSight can become a viable alternative to closed-source translation management systems in today’s changing global marketplace.

On October 23rd, Common Sense Advisory came out with “Industry Dreams of Open-Source TMS”, a blog post discussing the challenges of the GlobalSight Open Source initiative (www.globalsight.com). While it did raise several interesting points, the article brings up a few issues that require further discussion.

Total Cost of Ownership
The CSA article purports that “license fees account for 10% – 20% of the total cost of ownership,” and suggests that a free, open source GlobalSight license isn’t really consequential. Well given license fees are often 6-figures and most companies are looking at ways to reduce costs in this economy, our clients are telling us that the license fee is quite meaningful.
In addition, the important thing to remember here is that a company (LSP or enterprise customer), can install the product and, using the QuickStart Guide, be up and running in a couple of days with a pilot project. In a typical scenario, more pilot projects would follow, and results would guide how fast the system is moved into production – if at all. Likewise, the number and variety of projects and departments that are moved onto the system are guided by the success and confidence gained from its gradual use. Issues that can’t be resolved internally or by the open source community or through professional services will become apparent early on in this process, minimizing the investment risk.

We aren’t arguing that a company should download, install and commit a significant amount of resources from day one, just because the license is free. We are simply suggesting that the approach to innovation in this industry has been inefficient. It is time to “Collaborate to Innovate” instead of reinventing the wheel on both the client and vendor side each time we try to solve the same problem. Economics, freedom of choice, long-term security and the desire for collaborative innovation are driving the GlobalSight Open Source initiative. Participating companies will be in a position to try a sophisticated, enterprise-level TMS for very little cost. The downside risk to this approach is very small.

Lack of Critical Mass in Open Source Community
The article states that “the majority of open-source initiatives fail to garner enough development energy to stay competitive with commercial efforts over the long haul.” This statement, on its own, is true. But here are some reasons we expect the GlobalSight initiative to have a different result:

• The fact that GlobalSight is a very complex piece of enterprise software, with over 1.5 million lines of code, does make it a challenge for the typical developer to modify and extend the core application. But in talking to typical users, we hear the most need is around filters or adaptors, custom reporting and dashboards, and integration into existing business processes. Most of this work, it is important to point out, can be done external to the core application – either through the web services API, or through other forms of external code. Therefore, the modifications most companies need become simpler to make, share with the community and secure for their future.

• Over 160 people have signed-up for the initiative so far, even before the product has been launched.

• 12 industry-leading clients have volunteered their time to be on the GlobalSight Steering Committee to help support the initiative’s success.

• A standing-room-only crowd attended the first GlobalSight community meeting at the recent Localization World in Madison, WI where many clients and LSPs requested to be included in the Beta testing.

• Welocalize is making a significant investment to modernize the technology (see http://www.globalsight.com/roadmap.html ), with a 12-person development team currently transitioning the source code to tried and true open source standards such as MySQL, JBOSS and OpenLDAP. So the effort to move to open source also has the consequence of making Globalsight a more robust and scalable application.

• Welocalize is committing its $50 million dollar services operation to using GlobalSight internally. This in itself will create momentum for the product through constant enhancements and extensions to the product. Using the web services API, Welocalize is developing a portal to allow customers to track projects and key performance indicators through dashboards and other types of business reporting.

The Conflict Between the Needs of Corporate Users and LSPs
While the needs of these two groups are sometimes different, a vast majority of the requirements are the same. Everyone needs robust, server-side translation memories, terminology management, editable workflow tools and flexible reporting to provide the tools one needs to manage a business. Everyone is looking for standardization around TMX, SRX and TBX. The rest can and will be developed by the open source community. There are over 30 LSPs who have signed up so far to be a part of this initiative, many of whom were part of the Idiom LSP program.

In Summary
Welocalize is absolutely committed to providing a robust, open source TMS to be released in January 2009, which both clients and vendors can use to support their business. Some might question our motives in providing technology to competitors, but our vision is to drive innovation and standards in the most creative, collaborative and efficient way possible, thus increasing the opportunity for the industry as a whole to grow the overall size of the market.