On-Demand Translation

I want to thank all of our clients, staff and partners very much, because Welocalize had its best quarter ever in Q2 2010! In addition, Welocalize reached an interesting milestone recently. The majority of our work, currently 52% and growing rapidly, is now what we call on-demand translation.

We categorize the work we do for our clients in two ways: on-demand and traditional. Traditional localization we describe as the classic, project-based work that our industry is most accustomed to seeing. This type of work is driven by release cycles of varying lengths usually measured in months. Once a project is completed, we wait for the next release, translate what has changed and close the project.

Our on-demand segment is quite different. What was once a process of opening and closing a project has now become opening an always-on pipe between ourselves and our customer; what was once issuing a purchase order has now become billing against an open PO for the quarter or year; and what was once a release cycle of months is now measured in days or even hours. This open pipe and open PO create wide ranging challenges in reporting and configuring the supply chain. Load balancing, production accounting across the supply chain and quality are a few of the most immediate.

The shift to on-demand translation is being driven by the amount and the form of new content being produced. If our customer’s products are always-on and available on any device, anywhere in the world, at any time of day, in any language - naturally our service must change to meet the same requirements. This shift has been going on gradually for quite some time. Project automation with point solutions is steadily being replaced by process automation with enterprise solutions. This type of shift is common in industries as they scale. Vertical integration, supply chain automation, just-in-time delivery – advances and best practices in these areas drive competition in both manufacturing and service industries alike, and the trend is accelerating rapidly in our industry.

In order to keep pace, a Translation Management System such as GlobalSight becomes critical. However, the system alone is not enough. Interoperability, extensibility and standard data exchange across systems in the supply chain becomes essential in order to achieve the necessary reporting requirements and on-demand velocity.

The increase in this velocity is amazing. Welocalize grew 24% through June of 2010 with our on-demand segment growing at annual pace of 133% since 2007. Our GlobalSight community has grown to over 4,000 members, and we have plans to double our GlobalSight development budget. The combination of our GlobalSight “pipe” and our InSight business intelligence engine is driving our ability to continually increase velocity and be the on-demand Translation leader. We have some exciting new announcements around our development efforts still to come in 2010, so please stay tuned!

Smith

Return to Blog Home

|