Purpose:

In the "first wave" of Web globalization, multinational companies developed international Web sites in a decentralized fashion. Today, for cost-effectiveness, they are centralizing their Web infrastructure. This presentation is intended to help the audience understand this trend - the "second wave" of Web globalization - and develop strategies to implement a scalable, sustainable technical infrastructure that can power multilingual, multi-locale Web sites.

Description:

The first driver for the centralization trend is economic. Centralizing Web architectures can save millions of dollars on IT spending for a multinational company. Also, a centralized technical infrastructure is aligned with the business processes and organizational aspects of Web globalization.

There are two critical aspects of a centralized infrastructure:

• Web site architecture and components require internationalization (I18N), comprising front-end and back-end character handling, locale awareness and management, UI and content translatability and locale-specific data formatting.
• A centralized infrastructure often includes various forms of content repositories, a content management system and a globalization management system - whether homegrown, commercial enterprise software, or outsourced.

To ensure that the integration of these components can support the development, management and publishing of multilingual content for worldwide delivery, companies must consider the following technical issues: interoperability, scalability, usability, performance and security.

Conclusion:

Companies must build a Web Globalization technical infrastructure using an iterative approach. IT departments, Web design agencies and Web technology vendors should focus on all aspects of the solution in order to successfully ride the second wave of Web globalization.