SDL Acquires Language Weaver: SDL Acquisitions and the Reality of Global Information Management
Many of you may have read about the news today at SDL – we announced the acquisition of Language Weaver. I have been at SDL for 5 years now and can look back at a series of successful acquisitions by SDL which now complete the vision of having all the pieces to help companies manage content and deliver it in the right language and in the right format for their customers – Global Information Management. The picture is complete. Let's look at some of the key acquisitions over the last 5 years, how they have been so successful and how SDL has changed the game in managing content and language.
I joined the company just before we acquired TRADOS. It always takes time for people to get used to change, but looking at it now, it remains to be the solution used the most by translators around the world for managing translation memory. Last year we announced the innovative SDL Trados Studio 2009, which brought the best of both worlds together from SDL’s technology and the SDL Trados technology. And this year we added the ability for translators to work with their choice of machine translation, integrated within their translation memory environment.
The acquisition of Tridion was another major step for the company, expanding SDL from the language technology space into being the leader in the Web Content Management space. SDL Tridion was ranked recently as the leader in both Gartner and Forrester rankings of Web Content Management solutions. At the beginning of this year we acquired Fredhopper for eCommerce technology and recently released SDL SmartTarget which uses exactly this technology.
The acquisition of Idiom, with its WorldServer product was another example and the SDL WorldServer product continues to be developed extensively, taking customers well into the future and offering a secure transition for them into the future of managing global content. We added machine translation capability, connection to other SDL products such as SDL Global AMS, SDL MultiTerm, SDL Tridion and SDL Trados Studio to ensure tight integration of WorldServer and most importantly, to enable our customers to get further benefits by linking to other products – enabling them to link their language management to content management, and improve the quality and consistency of their content.
And there have been many other acquisitions – Passolo, Trisoft and XyEnterprise – the latter two of which now form the Structured Content Technologies division of SDL and is drawing more and more people to adopt DITA and S1000D technology, as well as SDL LiveContent technology which will help customers transition to dynamically publishing their content in different formats on the web, PDA etc. And most recently, this division acquired Xopus, which addresses the growing trend to broaden the adoption of structured authoring beyond technical writers.
It’s an exciting time and all the pieces in the pie are there for companies to now fully adopt a Global Information Management strategy. Back when I joined SDL in 2005, it was a vision. Now, with these recent acquisitions and the continual innovation to ensure our customers can create, manage, translate and publish content into the increasingly digital age, it is a reality and there is a solid, financially stable company that will work with global organizations to ensure they are prepared for the future. No wonder 42 of the top 50 global brands rely on us.
Comments