The next results from the Content Trends survey is a chart that has interesting information about Staffing.

When I get the white paper written, I’ll be creating my own charts to compare and contrast and break the information into smaller units. The white paper will be more analysis than I’m offering here in the blog.

The question

The question was about staffing. We wanted to know the general size of the group involved in content creation, management, and publishing. The results are shows below.

Remember to click the image above and then click again to see it full size.

Results

I was surprised that so many groups had so much IT involved. I was also surprised at the spread of occasional content contributors.

Almost no one has full time localizers, which didn’t surprise me. In my experience, you outsource localization because it happens in fits and starts. Full time staffing doesn’t make economic sense for most companies.

Feel free to discuss!

I hope your week is going well. Mine has been crazy busy.

I’m posting another graphic from the Content Trends survey for you. We asked about localization/translation and got this very interesting result.

Seems that 64.4% of you are either doing it now or see it coming.

In fact, the world is a small place and getting smaller.

In other news

Don’t forget you can see us live and in person. What a great way to sit and talk to us, tell us what you need, or see new stuff we have under development.

You can find us at:

9-11 Feb 2011
Orlando Advanced Pension Conference
Orlando FL

16-18 Feb 2011
Intelligent Content Conference
Palm Springs CA

14 -16 March 2011
WritersUA
Long Beach CA

16 March 2011
SouthWest Ohio STC chapter
Virtual presentation

24 March 2011
Silicon Valley STC chapter
Live presentation

This week is really busy – the holidays are certainly over!

I don’t have a lot of time for a post today but I wanted to share with you the next interesting result from the Content Trends Survey. Remember, we’ll be publishing a white paper about these results shortly.

Interesting question

The question was “If you were to invest in new tools, rank what matters to you” with a list of options. I’m including Critical and Important as the colored bars.

This is hard to read at this resolution so click the graphic and then click it again to see the large view.

What I found interesting is that Easy Content Reuse and Reducing Layout Time/effort were so important. Other things are interesting as well.

Discuss!

A couple of weeks ago Author-it announced a new partnership with Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: LIOX) the world’s leading translation and localization service provider.

The same week I attended the Localization World conference in Santa Clara, CA and had the opportunity to speak with many clients, partners, and analysts about the partnership. The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

While many can see the huge advantages in Author-it working together with Lionbridge to optimize the localization process for common clients, it was less clear what value this partnership would bring to the market at large.

For those of you familiar with the localization marketplace and technology, it has been clear for some time that the efficiencies realized by Translation Memory technologies, which were considerable, are now reaching their limits. In these lean times, organizations are now looking for the next leap in efficiency.

Some think this will come from managing and automating the localization workflow. I am convinced that while this may provide some improvements, they will not be significant, and will be largely due to the inefficient way in which people currently create and manage the source content.

I believe real efficiencies come from looking upstream to the point of content creation. The objective here should be to improve the consistency and reuse of content. This focus reduces the number of words requiring translation with obvious downstream savings in localization costs. The Nirvana in this process is achieved by fully integrating the authoring and translation process into a seamless end-to-end solution. By doing this, we eliminate the need for a separate localization workflow and automate the publishing process, thereby eliminating costly post translation Desktop Publishing.

We regularly see our clients exceed 70% content reuse across their publications, which corresponds directly to the word count needing translation. Just last week I read a presentation from HP where they have achieved 82-90% reuse on their various User Guides for Enterprise Servers using Author-it. Not only do they get the reduction on translation cost, but similar reductions in internal review cycles, and the virtual elimination of DTP, which in many cases represent 30-40% of the entire localization budget. These are significant savings!
So you may be asking now, why would Lionbridge want to partner with Author-it if doing so will reduce the cost of localization so significantly?

Firstly, localization is a competitive market as I am sure you all know – driven by positioning from SDL, organizations are being bombarded with ‘competitive opportunities’ to significantly reduce their overall expenditure.  Players like Moravia and TDC are jumping on the pursuit with strategic partnerships and acquisitions of efficiency producing technology.  Localization is changing fast for better or worse.  Creating intelligent long term alliances with ‘best practice’ solutions like Author-it allows Lionbridge to re-establish market leadership and better compete against the combined solutions of the top 10 localization vendors.

Secondly, the larger reality is that even with significant process efficiency, companies generally do not reduce their spend on localization. Instead, they get more value and more content at the same cost. This means expansion into new markets or localization of more products.  Indeed the localization industry has seen almost 50% growth over the last five years in spite of productivity tools like XML, Translation Memory and Machine Translation technologies reducing bottomline costs.  The business reality is there is just too much content to translate – finding more efficient ways to address this problem opens the translation flood gates.  While a ‘type of work’ shift occurs, it seldomly results in a net loss of revenue.

What the partnership does create for both companies is the visible thought and solution leadership that separates us from the competition, which shows our joint clients that we are innovative and can produce an industry beating efficiency for the complete end-to-end global content cycle.

I am extremely excited about taking our partnership forward, about out-performing our joint competition and about engaging our clients together with a solution offering such significant and compelling ROI.
Feel free to leave me your comments or questions.

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation

Posted by Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

It has been an interesting start to 2009. It is clear that the financial crisis continues and the world awaits the outcome of President Obama’s stimulus package to see how this will affect the US and global markets. As many commentators have hypothesized; while access to credit is a real issue, it is the consumer coal face where change will start. Changes in consumer spending flow through the entire business ecosystem from B2C through to the B2B sector.

So in a market such as this, how do you drive forward?

I think the answer to this question lies in how businesses are affected and are subsequently seeking to deal with the crisis. The effects are first felt in a reduction in sales revenues. This is a natural market reaction to a crisis – ‘hunker down’ mentality. This leads to additional emphasis on sales execution and a review of costs.

At Author-it we have been heavily focused on these issues in our client and prospect discussions. That is; how can Author-it help our clients with sales execution and how can we cut their costs? Obviously there is an investment to be made in purchasing and implementing Author-it, so we have been ruthless in presenting our case for real dollar cost savings above other gains. Here’s some scenarios to illustrate this point:

Issue: Authoring teams (of all persuasions) are under significant pressure. Teams are being asked to do more with less people and still expected to complete projects on time.
Solution: Author-it allows 40% + gains in authoring efficiency through advanced reuse, single sourcing and multi-output publishing. More output from less.

Issue: Authoring teams are becoming a distributed mix of permanent employees and contractors. This makes collaboration, authoring, edit review and approval very difficult.
Solution: Author-it Live allows web based, ‘anywhere, anytime access’ to content for authoring, review and publishing. Huge time and efficiency gains.

Issue: Localization budgets are under pressure but there is still a requirement to sell in global markets and therefore deliver localized content.
Solution: Author-it Localization Manager can cut localization costs by more than 50%. This is a real cash saving.

Issue: Sales teams need to produce more revenue. This means more sales proposals and therefore more administrative load.
Solution: A number of clients (and us of course) use Author-it to generate custom sales proposals at a small fraction of the time and effort required using traditional methods. This means better quality, compliant proposals and an increased chance of sales success.

Issue: Authoring applications are siloed meaning it is difficult or impossible to leverage content assets across an enterprise.
Solution: Author-it is an enterprise authoring and content management application. Its ease of use and intuitive UI means it can be used by all business units allowing content to be shared and reused throughout an enterprise. Huge efficiency gains across the enterprise.

The above scenarios focus on addressing the core issues many companies are experiencing right now that is how to; cut costs and increase revenue. I believe it is by focussing on ROI and these key areas that both software purchasers and vendors can come together and mutually work through the worst effects of the current market.

Posted by Steve Davis, President, Author-it Software Corporation