InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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December 11, 2000 |
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Business On The World Wide Web
It's not enough to have Web pages that sell wares in English. With 75% of the world's Web market expected to live outside the United States by 2005, global appeal is the byword.
By Dawn Gareiss
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.S. companies that operate their E-businesses as though their country has the only culture worth paying attention to are in for a rude awakening. Already, more than half the world's online users don't live in the United States; they speak different languages, use different currencies, abide by different legal systems, and have very different preferences, experiences, and tastes than their American counterparts.Unquestionably, the Internet has opened foreign markets that, for decades, have been costly and difficult to enter. A simple Web site can attract visitors from all over the world. But a Web site written only in English, hawking wares marketed with an American mentality, and priced in U.S. dollars will have a tough time turning visitors into buyers. If a U.S. com-pany wants to make money online in markets outside this country, one thing's for sure: Its Web operations have to be global.
Enter Web globalization, a new breed of software to help multinational E-businesses manage, synchronize, and update the content of multiple-language sites. Services include translation into one or more foreign languages and Web-site localization that helps companies adapt their businesses to a particular market or culture.
Globalization software and services couldn't have come at a more opportune time. In 1999, 45% of the world's online users were located in North America, according to Jupiter Research. By 2005, Jupiter estimates that nearly three-quarters of online users will reside outside North America.
In 1999 the U.S. accounted for 62%, or $80.5 billion of the $130.5 billion, of total Internet spending, according to International Data Corp. By 2003, IDC predicts that share will grow to $726 billion, but it will equal only 45% of the projected $1.6 trillion in worldwide E-commerce spending, more than half of which will occur outside the United States.
To some, the realization that the bulk of E-commerce revenue could come from places other than the United States may be surprising. After all, the United States continues to blaze trails in online use and spending. But perceptions are quickly changing.
"All of a sudden it's like the English-speaking world stood up and said, 'My God, there are people speaking other languages out there,'" says Alison Toon, global localization program manager for Hewlett-Packard's online IT resource center. "The mentality has changed. Companies are more aware of the world out there that speaks other languages."
Experts agree that tapping into the lucrative worldwide E-commerce market will require business acumen. "There are a number of people worldwide who speak English," says Charlie Baxter, CEO of eTranslate Inc., a company that provides consulting, integration, and language services. "Can you go global without putting things in local languages? You can, but how deep do you want your presence to go? Going in English won't effectively deal with the market."
Transforming a Web operation into a global business isn't easy. "American companies are foolish if they think it's simple," says Lars Sjoo, VP at Event Zero, an E-business service firm in Arlington, Mass. The globalization process is more complex than simply translating an existing English site into another language, he says.
"Companies need to start with the market itself and its challenges and go through those challenges one by one to figure out what they need to do," Sjoo says. "I'm nervous that some American companies just buy globalization software, plug it in, and think that they'll have millions of users [abroad]." Global software can be a good tool, but Sjoo suggests American companies need to consider cultural and political aspects when taking their business elsewhere. Other factors that need attention include legal, staffing, competitive, and payment issues, he says.
Moreover, keeping up with changes on a single-language site is difficult enough. It becomes even more complex when there are multiple renditions in different languages with content to suit the tastes of different regions.
During Travelocity.com's first year of business, 20% of site visitors came from overseas. To turn these visitors into buyers, Travelocity realized it would have to support foreign languages and currencies, supply local content, and set up support centers in areas where it wanted to do business.
In HP's effort to go global, it also discovered the need to ramp up support. When the company's IT resource center went global two years ago, there were manual processes in place for analyzing the foreign market and determining which information from the company's massive databases had to be translated. Then the data had to be moved between local translators. "We could see that we were losing time," says Toon. "There was no way that we would be able to keep managing this manually."
Toon wanted a product that would help manage the process and let HP reuse text that had already been translated into particular languages. Ensuring that HP's message wasn't lost in the translation was also a big challenge. "We have to make sure we're speaking the same language about HP in each country and sending the same customer message," she says. Toon eventually selected GNet, a product Uniscape Inc. provides in a Web-hosted model.
Uniscape is just one of several vendors that offer software and services designed to help companies expand operations into foreign markets. Uniscape, Idiom, GlobalSight, and others provide software that incorporate methodologies, language-translation tools, workflow processes and content-management functions so companies can maintain control and keep track of who's adding what information. Vendors also have added synchronization to their software to ensure Web-site changes are reflected across all the site's regional renditions.
For example, Idiom's WorldServer includes a Web-content interface that links WorldServer to a variety of back-end sources. It also features a business rules engine that helps companies establish processes to determine how content is used, repurposed, and synchronized.
A few of the available products use translation memory, a process that remembers all previously translated text so it can be reused. Uniscape's GNet provides Toon with a translation memory that stores HP's localized content for future projects. The program also makes sure that information is translated consistently between languages. Furthermore, it automates the file-handling process; developers, translators and reviewers can submit files via a Web interface and track their progress.
There are other vendors that mainly offer consulting services so companies can build their own globalization features into sites.
For Larry Spear, co-founder and co-CEO of Go2Call.com, an international PC-to-phone service provider, globalization was part of his company's strategy from day one. To do so "we felt we'd need some type of software to manage languages and content," Spear says. After launching the company's first Web site in January, Spear began looking for globalization software and is in the final stages of implementing Idiom's WorldServer.
The software will help Go2Call.com manage synchronization and localization across multilingual sites and create workflows so that updates on the U.S. site get translated to the other sites. A third-party translator handles the translations, through an agreement with Idiom.
Implementing globalization software can be costly. WorldServer starts at $125,000. But for Go2Call.com, time to market overruled price concerns. "It gives us a capacity to deliver many languages fairly soon," says Spear.
Like any software package, the globalization tools available today can't handle everything. For HP's Toon, globalization software still can't refine the human factor. "No matter how much you automate the workflow, if person A doesn't do his job, the process slows down. You have to have the human element," Toon says.
WorldServer's drawback, says Spear, is that "for content changes, it's very good. But programming changes are relatively difficult." He also says he'd like the ability to convert currency in future versions of the software.
Not all companies are opting for outside help to globalize their Web sites. SurplusChannel.com is an Internet marketplace for buyers and sellers of surplus goods that saw an opportunity to evolve it's internal software so it could support users around the globe. "When we designed this package, we had the global market in mind," says Cindy Zhao, co-founder and VP of business development. SurplusChannel.com's software interface is designed to support any language, Zhao says.
Laura Pitts, VP of marketing, says SurplusChannel.com evaluated third-party tools but found that they would require as much work as it would to do everything in-house. A homegrown system also allows more control, according to Zhao. "We have a better understanding of it and can deliver solutions in timely fashions," Zhao says. "With a third party, there's the potential for messy situations."
Digital Now, an online developer of digital imaging technology for the photo-processing industry, also took on globalization internally. "We've translated our consumer-products site internally using our own methods of software development," says Stephen Giordano Jr., VP and chief technology officer.
Digital Now's products are available in 14 languages and it uses outside firms, including RWS Group, to handle translation and linguistics. The company updates its sites centrally in the United States after receiving information from its third-party translators.
Giordano says an outside globalization software vendor doesn't make sense for Digital Now: "Our products are releasing at such a fast pace that having an outside vendor do this would be hard."
Despite the many challenges and methods of going global, Event Zero's Sjoo says American companies should jump on the opportunities available today. He believes the United States is more than two years ahead of Europe in terms of Internet penetration. This, he says, affords significant market opportunities to American companies willing to globalize.
"If you were an Internet entrepreneur and had the chance to go back in time and start over again, wouldn't you want to do it?" Sjoo says. Globalization actually gives companies a chance to do that in some markets, especially in Europe, because America is so far ahead, he says. "It's a chance to go back in time."
Illustration by James Yang
Photo of Spear by David Joel
Photo of Zhao and Pitts by Dan Dreesen
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