When SDL announced that it was buying Trados, a week later, Lionbridge countered with its acquisiton of Bowne Global Solutions, each released their press announcements, held press conferences, and populated their websites with detailed information about what they bought and why. We offered our detailed opinions on both acquisitions, both here (Lionbridge, SDL) and in our Quick Takes on Lionbridge and SDL. For that matter, we offered an opinion on the likelihood of such a purchase well in advance, back in March when we dissected BGS’s 2004 results (The Bowne Code: Read Between the Lines) and in February when we analyzed Lionbridge’s financials (Lionbridge: Sowing the Seeds of Growth).

In the coming weeks some longer lead time publications will present articles and interviews. What you’ll read will be a lot of marketing spin and “party line” about the acquisitions in interviews with Lionbridge CEO Rory Cowan and SDL CEO Mark Lancaster. Here’s what you can expect to hear as Cowan and Lancaster mount the bully pulpit in these upcoming interviews.

Lionbridge’s chief executive will focus on scale, scale, and more scale to ramp the company to US$1 billion in sales over the coming few years. Cowan will emphasize the managed services model toward which the company is moving, noting Lionbridge’s investment in behind-the-scenes technology like Logoport that will guarantee high service levels for Lionbridge customers. He will note the company’s increased ability to provide services across the entire application and content development life cycle, the cost-effectiveness of farming out labor to low-wage countries like India, and the increased geographic footprint that BGS brings to the company.

SDL CEO Lancaster will highlight the convergence of vision between SDL and Trados management that led to the acquisition. He will emphasize SDLs role meeting the “global information management” needs of large enterprises in both technology and language services. The company’s now bigger technology portfolio, more best practices and methodologies, increased economies of scale, and amplified marketing energy will give it a more strategic role in the entire information life cycle from authoring to localization to publishing. This more expansive vision will move SDL from the known quantity of language services and tools into a potential US$50 billion market of content transformation.

That’s not to say that everything in the coming weeks you read will be predictable posturing. Multilingual Computing will showcase John Freivalds’ interview of Cowan and Lancaster, replete with industry background and commentary from industry pundits (us included). In the same issue, Beninatto and DePalma weigh in on the two models — managed services vs. technology centrism — taken by Lionbridge and SDL, respectively. By the end of the summer, the dust will have settled, the process of integration will be well underway, and we will see how the positioning evolved since now. Stay tuned.