UPDATE! Read the Summary Report on the IUC23 Exhibitor's Panel!

Vendors of tools, products and services for the internationalization and localization markets will present the latest advances in their technologies and methodologies and describe the challenges that face the industry.

See the Invitation to Exhibit.

The panel presentations and presenters are as follows.

Tony O'Dowd, Alchemy Software Development Ltd.

Organizations that execute a localization strategy must decide whether they wish to internally develop their localization technology or license it from a third party vendor. This "build vs. buy" decision can be challenging because it requires organizations to balance easily quantified factors with strategic and emotional factors that are difficult or impossible to quantify. The decision is important, however, because it typically impacts both the nature of the strategic initiative as well as its ultimate success in enabling companies to penetrate new markets quickly and accelerate revenue growth opportunities. While internally developed solutions will always play a role in meeting their initial localization requirements, recent surveys reflect a strong preference for third-party applications over custom solutions.

This presentation explores key financial issues relating to the build vs. buy decision in an attempt to explain why almost 75 percent of companies would prefer to license packaged applications or suites rather than develop their own localization technology.

A key theme throughout the presentation is that organizations making the build vs. buy decision can maximize shareholder value by focusing on the localization technologies expected return on investment (ROI). It begins with an overview of ROI analysis and then explores each of the three critical factors that drive ROI: total cost of ownership (TCO), functional capabilities, and project risk.

The presentation concludes that most organizations making the build vs. buy decision cannot financially justify internally developed localization technology, given the availability of packaged applications that are more functionally robust, provide greater flexibility, offer a lower TCO, and generate a higher ROI.

Arturo Quintero, Moravia IT

As the 2003 Unicode conference is being hosted in the Czech Republic, it seems fitting to draw a parallel between the highly technical theme of the Unicode conference, and the Czech Republic, showing how Moravia, a company in the Central European environment has grown from strength to strength since the 1990's to what is now a respected globalization company with worldwide offices in the USA, Asia, Ireland and across Europe.

This presentation will cover following topics:

• The advantage of the large resource pool, existing in the country, of highly educated motivated engineers and transforming these into today's localization and globalization professionals.
• Challenges along the way.
• The advantages of multicultural backgrounds.
• Technologies available and major technological innovations introduced during the years
• Aspects and difficulties of growing a company with Central European roots into a global enterprise with a worldwide customer base.

Going forward, what future is there for the region? How is the country positioned with the continuing challenges of the US and European value chains taking into account the global technology recession and the growth of the production and development opportunities in Asia. Closer to home, how does Moravia shape its future in the industry, how it builds new capabilities and creates new advantages in the technology area to enhance its product offering.

Thomas Emerson, Basis Technology Corporation

This presentation will focus on issues in search and retrieval in Arabic text. Mr. Emerson will provide a brief introduction to the Arabic language and an overview of the challenges of processing Arabic text. Issues covered will include a discussion of the complexities of search and retrieval of written Arabic given that words frequently incorporate affixes and infixes indicating verb aspect, object, conjugation, person, number, gender, and other syntactic attributes which must be normalized before the text is ready for indexing, keyword searches, or other text manipulation. Mr. Emerson will also discuss the challenges to processing that occur due to written Arabic's inconsistent use or absence of vowels. Finally, he will discuss the approach Basis Technology took in designing its Rosette Arabic Language Analyzer (ARLA), a morphological analyzer which normalizes Arabic text and performs basic stemming by removing grammatical affixes (such as conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns) that can interfere with effective searching.

Kamal Mansour, Agfa Monotype Corporation

Typography is the soul of Agfa Monotype. With roots dating back to the 1880s, Agfa Monotype represents a rich history of typographic innovations and design and is still at the forefront of all things related to fonts.

Over the 100-plus years that we have been helping people communicate, Agfa Monotype has provided multilingual typeface solutions used in nearly every country. Based on our extensive international presence, we have created one of the world's finest and most extensive font libraries supporting non-Latin and extended-Latin scripts. The WorldType® Unicode-compliant font library has the breadth and flexibility to fulfil any language-related needs, particularly those with non-Latin requirements, by giving developers the option of subdividing the fonts into smaller, more manageable modules based on linguistic, regional or other specialized requirements. Agfa Monotype is also the only company in the world that has produced fonts that provide full Unicode™ 3.0 character set coverage (over 49,000 characters).

Beyond the vast multilingual support we offer, Agfa Monotype fonts and technologies also proliferate throughout the office environment. Millions of printers in use today all over the world contain type technology from the company such as Agfa Monotype's patented Universal Font Scaling Technology™ and MicroType® compression technologies. Fast, high-quality text display on memory-constrained devices such as cell phones, PDAs and TV set-top boxes is achievable through Agfa Monotype iType®, a high-speed TrueType®-based font engine.

Laurel Wagers, Multilingual Computing, Inc.

MultiLingual Computing & Technology is the magazine that covers the areas of language technology, translation, internationalization, localization, global Web sites and international software development.

In this presentation, managing editor Laurel Wagers will talk about what is happening at the magazine and about projects being planned. She will also outline the editorial calendar for the next several issues and invite people attending to contribute articles, reviews and ideas about what topics they would like to see addressed in the magazine.

MultiLingual Computing & Technology will also be offering free one-year subscriptions to people who attend IUC 23.