Last year we wrote about Sinometrics and Skrivanek reselling the PASSOLO visual localization engineering product, assessing their efforts 0 and 1 habañeros, respectively. PASS Engineering’s goal in signing up these language service providers as sales channels was to increase the number of sales reps pushing the product to practitioners both inside companies and LSPs, a chronic problem for the small vendors in the sub-US$100 million language technology industry. Small software companies like Alchemy and PASS rely on channels like these to get in front of software engineers who need tools to localize the increasing amount of software-driven applications and products, but who don’t know that such tools exist.

Last year we thought that Sinometrics would have a tough time selling a localization engineering tool to fellow LSPs and did not expect many sales to end users, while we believed that Skrivanek would find it easier to sell the product into a virgin market. At that time we opined that Alchemy’s relationship with Trados and Multilizer’s partnership with LingoPort would work out better. Well, we all know what happened to Trados later in the year, and Multilizer subsequently went bankrupt and has since reorganized.

We decided to find out whether we were just as wrong about Sinometrics and Skrivanek vis-à-vis PASS, so we spoke with Sinometrics CEO Rick Myers and Skrivanek’s Director of Translation Memory Solutions, Joseph Deignan.

• Myers told us that Seattle-based Sinometrics, exclusive North American distributor for PASS, has lots of deals in the pipeline, but he’s still priming the proverbial sales pump. He said that “few LSPs are buying, and the ones who do are driven by their customers. More mid-sized enterprises are buying than I expected. They are typically buying PASSOLO for more embedded applications, not your typical technology/software/retail application.”
• Over in the Czech Republic, CEO Pavel Skřivánek hired ex-Alchemist Deignan to provision central and eastern European localization professionals with third-party tools from PASS and SkyCAT to complement its language services. Deignan told us that “cross-border business consolidations in central and eastern Europe are fueling a massive growth in translation and localization needs. We find customers at two extremes of the marketplace. At one end are large enterprise and government players. At the other end are freelance translators seeking to break out of the commoditized world of documentation translation.”

While both plans are laudable, the reality is that small resellers typically pitch these tools to their regular clientele. An ideal distributor would be an Adobe, Apple, Borland, IBM, Microsoft, or some other company in the application development stack. But until localization becomes a burning issue among customers of those behemoths, we don’t see much reseller or even buy-out activity. Until then, LSPs like Sinometrics and Skrivanek will be the best hope ISVs have for supplementing their tiny sales forces.