After nearly a decade in the localization services arena, I’m excited to move to the technology side of the industry and provide an "insider's perspective" on Steven's colorful Victory LAP blog posted last week. 

As a customer advocate, passionate about creating the right solution for each client, my ability to align true customer-focused solutions with my sales teams has always been contradicted by the need to drive services revenue as an LSP. Enter Cloudwords and our services-agnostic approach to enhancing customer experience through connectivity, via our Localization Automation Platform (LAP)!

I am excited to be one month into my role as Global Head of Customer Success for Cloudwords...the world’s only LAP (Localization Automation Platform). The Localization industry is quite foreign to me and it’s comforting to find that some things are universal in the world of Automation SaaS. For instance, the Localization industry lives on acronyms. MT, TM, LSP, CAT, TMS, IT (not that IT), WTT, LAP, all have me flexing my AMM...Acronym Memorization Muscle.

This is a skill I honed during my years at Marketo, an Adobe Company.

As a marketer tasked with expanding to new markets, it might seem like you’ll need to spend a lot of new resources and talent to build your global content operation. But it ain’t necessarily so.

Your company is expanding and you will soon be a proud global presence. You’re getting ready to sing your song to the world: you’ve researched global markets, chosen territories that are likeliest to increase revenue, and all of your materials have been translated perfectly.

Time to press play?

Not so fast: translation is only one part of this tune.

When Mary Meeker recently released her annual Internet Trends Report, it set off a globalization craze. Armed with a treasure trove of data, marketing teams are now scrambling to expand their content, services and products into new markets.

When “going global” with marketing content, most companies focus on beating the competition. What marketers soon realize is that their biggest problem in getting the right content translated and delivered to far-flung regions is a lot closer to home. With apologies to Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy and they is us!”

I love Scott Brinker’s opening line in his recent blog introducing the 2015 version of his ever-growing, ever-popular Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: “There’s a lot of marketing technology in the world, my friend.”