Discussion Findings: Alternatives to the SDL/Idiom GMS

I had the opportunity to moderate the discussion on Alternatives to the SDL/Idioms GMS yesterday and came up with some key observations.

Positive outcomes from the acquisition: Although I probed and waited through awkward pauses to try to get participants to list some potentially positive outcomes from the SDL/Idiom acquisition, there were only three positive results and a dozen negative results listed. The positive results from the client perspective are that Idiom is now owned by a better-financed company and clients who own both SDL and Idiom TMs may at some point expect better interoperability. The only positive outcome from the LSP perspective was that this may present an opportunity to help client's migrate from one system to another.

Negative outcomes from the acquisition: The negative concerns are rather plain and have been listed everywhere, including:
From clients:

• Great uncertainty as to the future of the product
• Less responsiveness/flexibility with SDL than with Idiom
  
• Lack of openness/transparency with SDL
• Lack of platform choice with SDL
• Cost implications in the potentially inevitable switch from one platform to another
• Potentially worse service for SDL clients because SDL and its employees are distracted by the acquisition (and potential job loss)

From LSPs (Idiom's LSP Partners):

• Has all previous effort to help develop Idiom gone to waste?
• Does it make sense to sell Idiom with services?
• This puts industry innovation at risk
• In general, LSPs have not received the assurances needed to continue supporting Idiom
  

Few people know much about any alternatives. Many of the potential alternatives mentioned did not have all the following necessary parts of a GMS (of which the first 3 are taken from CSA's 2007 GMS scorecard):

• Business Management (vendor management, reporting)
• Process Management (PM, workflow)
• Language Management (scalable translation memory, terminology management, text extraction, and optional machine translation)
• Document Management (CMS interoperability)

Expectations clients have for a potential alternative GMS: At minimum, an alternative GMS must have the above. Some clients emphasized an open API, platform choice, support for open standard, cost justification, and something that won't lock you in. Interestingly enough, Elanex technology offers a lot of this, and although it comes with Elanex services, clients can integrate preferred freelancers and even preferred in-house translators, editors, and project managers. Also cost justification seems to be key since participating clients indicated that with all the training and customization required, it takes 2-3 years for clients to earn back their investment in Idiom. (With ElanexINSIDE, up front costs are minimal and can be earned back in weeks, not years.)

In short, it appears that no one is happy with the current situation, but there is not yet a consensus on what the alternative should be for everyone.


Note: In an effort to keep the discussion objective, Elanex participants tried to limit commentary on Elanex's excellent alternative GMS mostly to smaller discussion's outside the official session.