I was always a little disappointed when magazine editors used their introductory column for a seemingly unrelated collection of tidbits. It’s as if (in fact many would actually admit) they didn’t have any one topic that deserved a complete column – so they mopped up the leftovers and cooked up a stew of an editorial. However – I now find myself in the same boat. So much has happened recently at Clay Tablet – that to commit a complete post to every one would take weeks. So – tail firmly between my legs and with apologies to editors and publishers everywhere – here is my collection of recent Clay Tablet news…

Of Connections…

Our goal at Clay Tablet is to connect the world. And while this is a lofty goal, we’re actually making remarkable progress. Latest connections that are up and running include two great TMS products, Plunet Business Manager and Andra AG’s ontram. Watch for demo’s of both these connections soon.

And speaking of demos…

Clay Tablet 2.0 has been shuffling content to and from translation solutions for years now. Dozens of implementations worldwide, lots of happy clients and ecstatic content and translation managers. But still – potential clients and partners prefer to SEE the product in action early in any relationship. With the help of Sitecore – one the leading CMS integrations we’ve built – a compelling and enlightening demo is at hand. This is a double edged sword I’m finding. While it’s a lot of fun to show off how easy Clay Tablet 2.0 makes sending content for translation (and getting it back!) we find we’re getting overwhelmed with demo requests. But I have to say – it really is so much fun to experience the sense of revelation and excitement that users feel when they see how easy CT2.0 makes the translation process. That’s keeping it very easy to crank out the demos every day.

And speaking of large demand…

We’ve always touted the efficiency that CT2.0 delivers to the translation process. And we’re always reminding new clients that the return path from translation is often the real pinch-point. This is because so much more content can be returned than is sent. Every document, webpage or asset gets multiplied by the number for target languages. You send out 25 pages of your website – translate into 5 languages and then have to deal with over 100 pages coming back. But what happens when you’re sending 1000’s of pages or assets? And you’re not translating into 5, 10 or even 15 – but twenty-nine languages? For every 100 pages of content sent – almost three thousand return! So it was no small win for baby furniture maker Stokke of Norway Stokke.com to connect their Sitecore CMS directly to their translation firm using Clay Tablet 2.0. This allowed them to translate all the content in on the site and made the process much simpler – in fact it may have simply made it possible! Another case where CT2.0 delivers tremendous efficiency. All in a days work.

See part one here.

Built to Scale. In Real Time.
As I mentioned in my previous post, scalability was concern #1 as we started developing the Saas edition of Clay Tablet.

Up until recently, when building out a SaaS offering, your only choice was to do a lot of upfront planning and figure out, or more likely, guess at, how much traffic or load you were going to need to support. From there you’d start buying servers, find somewhere to host them, and then manage them. It took massive investments of both people and time and there were huge risks. If you didn’t get the traffic you needed you were burning money at an insanely fast rate as servers sat idle, not enough servers and you were crashing or ticking off (and probably losing) customers with slow load times.

To address our scalability concerns Clay Tablet Saas has been built to leverage Elastic Cloud Computing (ECC) technologies (a.k.a “Grid Computing“) .

ECC uses the concept of Virtual Servers - there are of course still physical server boxes but these powerful web servers are divided (the processing power, hard drive space, bandwidth, etc.) up into virtual servers within. So for every physical box in the server environment, there are actually several virtual servers hard at work. Large service providers built these server farms and then rent out processor time.

Now, instead of doing intense planning that will definitely be wrong, we simply rent the processing power that we need to handle the load that our clients throw at us.

In the old style of developing Saas applications adding new servers was an involved process. Simply procuring a new server could take days or even a week, then it needed to be configured, tested and finally worked into the server environment. In contrast, Clay Tablet Saas proactively monitors our message queues and turns servers on or off depending on the load. We can literally go from running a couple of servers early in the morning, bump it up to 10 as we get a little burst around lunch time, and then, within minutes, be running 100 server instances when all of our clients spontaneously decide to get all of their content retranslated at once (and then back down to a couple when things cool down again).

This elasticity means we’ll always have the computing power we need at our finger tips, on demand 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Next: Built to Scale. Simply

Last week we announced the availability of the Saas version of our Clay Tablet product.

In reality, it’s a bit of a misnomer to call the Saas offering a “version” of the Clay Tablet software - version two was architected from the ground up to run in a Saas environment. In fact, the licensed product is actually a derivative of the Saas architecture, not the other way around as is common with many applications. Either way you look at it, what’s important to note is the fact that our Saas offering isn’t a stripped or watered down version of the enterprise licensed software. Both versions offer the same functionality and capabilities.

So why did we wait to launch the Saas version? The reality is with SaaS the application is often the easy part, it’s the business functions and considerations that come along with the service that add a lot of complexity to it.

In the context of our application, more than anything else we knew this application had to be able to scale - and not in the “hey, looks like there’s more volume going through the system - we should add another server next month” sense but scale in as close to real time as possible.

The Challenge of “Bursty”
In many ways translation is a very “bursty” event, especially in small to medium size businesses. New website, new collateral, etc. - get it finished and then send it all for translation at once.

For licensed software it’s not too big a deal, it would take a lot of content to swamp a single server, and even then it would generally just be a matter of processing time. In a Saas environment though, you need to add a zero (or two) to everything you consider. One client pushing 10 or 100 times their usual volume, not necessarily a big deal. 10% of your clients? 20%? And worst of all, you never know it’s coming.

At Clay Tablet, or goal is to make translation a utility for the enterprise*. When you turn on a light switch at home, you expect the light to come on and don’t want to worry about what is happening in the background to make sure that service is available when you need it. we believe, there’s no reason why a content manager should have to spend any time worrying about how they’re going to get their content translated. They should be able to click “translate” and know their content is going to the right vendor and will translated by one of the many skilled translators in our industry.

Over the next few days I’ll share some of our thoughts on the SaaS application and, more importantly, explain how our system has been built from the ground up to support not just your ongoing needs, but also the unpredictable needs of all of our clients, and help bring the reality of utility translation to the enterprise.

Next: Built to Scale. In Real Time.

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*A Utility, not a commodity. We recognize that while there are ongoing advancements in the technology that helps make translation happen, this is still very much a human powered industry. What we strive to do is make the processes between the people (content managers, translators and reviewers) in the content lifecycle as streamlined and reliable as possible.

Today’s news about SDL acquiring Idiom could be good news for customers of both firms. But its also caused a flood of fear, uncertainly and doubt amongst many members of the translation industry, inlcuding LSP’s, clients and technology vendors.

However, this news poses no challenge for those using Clay Tablet as their connectivity solution - since this is exactly the kind of scenario Clay Tablet is built for. In fact - today’s the kind of day where Clay Tablet clients simply sigh with relief knowing they made a great decision to use Clay Tablet.

Since we connect to the TMS’s of both vendors, as well as all the other leading TMS solutions, our clients will be seamlessly supported through any changes, migrations or product mergers that might occur. And, as those changes happen, only the “TMS-side” connection will be affected - saving countless hours of integration revisions on the “CMS-side”. Better yet - as Technology partners with SDL - we’ll have “day zero” support for any new or revised products, ensuring that clients can simply update thier Clay Tablet software to ensure ALL their connections continue to work. Of course, our SaaS clients won’t even notice - updates will happen automatically.

While we’ve always been quite excited about how dramatically we lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by reducing the amount of connection revisions that are required to keep content flowing as systems change, I never really thought of Clay Tablet at “insurance”, until today!

It’s a probably a good day for SDL and Idiom. It’s certainly a great day to be a Clay Tablet client.

RK

While it seems what Clay Tablet does is sell software – we are actually in the business of helping companies solve business process issues. And few industries love efficient processes and can benefit from serving clients in multiple languages more than the Manufacturing industry. Last week, the Better Process Podcast, which specifically serves the manufacturing space, picked up on the intersection of these two goals and interviewed me to find out more. We  talked about the basics of how firms are struggling with translation business processes and I made specific recommendations on how to make substantial improvements.

 Interestingly, as an ex-broadcaster (on the Business beat no less) I was expecting to do several “takes” which would be edited down to a brief couple of “sound bites”.  But - this was “live to master” as they say in the recording industry. So while it’s brief - it’s dense and “live”.

 But most impressive has been the response. We’ve had an amazing number of people not only listen to the piece - but comment that it’s really helped them understand what we do. I guess it’s a bit of our ubiquitious trade show pitch in a can!

Have a listen at: http://betterprocess.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=300426

A prominent industry analyst pinged me recently asking about Canadian examples of user generated content (UGC for those of you who can’t live without an acronym). I couldn’t think of any – despite my unique location at the nexus between dozens of content system vendors, translation firms and clients. Sure, UGC is all the rage – and I don’t say that flippantly either – I use if daily to influence my quest for the latest hi-fi piece of kit or upgrade to my sports car. But Canadians in particular and enterprises in general aren’t picking up on the benefits of translating this content for other markets. And they should.

But this segues nicely into another hot topic in localization industry these days – market size. While most estimates put the localization industry around $10B annually, there’s strong contention that this is too darn small. Not that the number is wrong – just that the number SHOULD be much larger. Heck, the US-only popcorn industry is about $10B a year. It’s my contention that the localization industry is a sleeping giant. And as technology unlocks content and makes it easy to get that content translated, I predict we’ll see the infamous “hockey stick” growth that start-up firms love to project. But this time it’s not for a single company – but for a whole industry. It’s going to be a wild ride!

As Clay Tablet grows, I feel it’s both an honour and a duty to note some of our observations from this most unique vantage point. Since we’re at the nexus of three fascinating industries, Content Management, Translation/Localization and Business Process Management, Clay Tablet is in a unique position to aggregate trends and note interesting developments. Here, key members of the Clay Tablet team will regularly comment on those observations and hopefully spark some spirited discussion, or at lease introspection. Thanks for stopping by.

Robinson Kelly
CEO and Founder
Clay Tablet technologies