As the dust settles from SDL’s acquisition of CMS provider Tridion, competitors are reviewing their business plans. Some are smiling, others wear grimmer faces. To recap the news, SDL bought a position further up the content management food chain. With a full-fledged, globally aware CMS in its sales quiver, the company can now bid on an entire global website application, not just the translation crumbs at the end of the process. This offering of CMS + TMS + services will meet the needs of many companies seeking a one-stop shopping experience, but reduce SDL’s traction in engagements with other CMS partners, formal and informal. While partnering among global information management suppliers accelerates, enterprise buyers should expect to see TMS suppliers and language service providers pushing messages like:
- Neutrality. Idiom will promote itself as the Switzerland of the Cont(in)ent — unless it gets acquired by a CMS player or Lionbridge takes a third look at it. Across, whose headquarters is closer to the literal Switzerland, has already gotten more aggressive, inking relationships with up-and-comers like MadCap and Schema. Germany-based across (the company prefers the lowercase ee cummings spelling) is also positioning in the LSP market with recent deals such as its strategic partnership with Luxembourg-based euroscript (apparently another fan of ee cummings).
- FUD. LSPs with solid TMS offerings of their own — think Lionbridge, Sajan, thebigword, Translations.com, and Transware — can target SDL partners like Day, Documentum, Interwoven, and Vignette. Their tales of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about SDL’s "sure we own a competitor of yours, but we can still be friends" strategy won’t stop SDL’s partnering efforts, but may slow them down.
How should companies without their own comprehensive translation workflow proceed? Enterprise buyers will pick and choose TMS products as their CMS needs dictate, but to meet their productivity commitments, language service providers will have to commit themselves to some TMS solution — homegrown or purchased. Language vendors must:
- Automate. LSPs seeking to cross over the US$5M threshold must automate their translation processes at the project management, technology, human (translator and reviewer), and business integration levels.
- Extend. Connections to CMS will be one of the critical factors in software selection. Without workflow technology that connects to multiple CMS repositories, LSPs cannot meet the demands for consolidated information life cycle management (ILM) in the global enterprise. Idiom, with the greatest number of purpose-built connectors, benefits most from the SDL acquisition.Despite SDL’s proposed vertical integration of its TMS with Tridion’s CMS, ILM content flows remain a many-to-many issue. This gap creates a middleware opportunity for companies like Clay Tablet Technologies (CTT) and Progress Software. Traditionally it’s been hard to make money with middleware, but in the many-to-many world of cross-border content management, this black art could be profitable until CMS interchange standards solidify.
- Surround. With its M&A leap up the food chain, SDL lands a strong, vertically integrated solution for global website management. However, Tridion is not an enterprise content management system. It only does websites, so SDL’s partnerships with other CMS platforms like Documentum and PTC will continue. Whether these other alliances grow or not depends on many factors, but ultimately comes down to how the paired vendors (SDL and each CMS partner) respond to individual customer requests. Our advice to other vendors: Partner faster and smarter than SDL.
