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Offshoring development just doesn’t cut it. At least Adam Asnes said so -- and he has come to know a thing or two about working globally as President and CEO of Boulder-based software internationalization firm Lingoport since he founded it in 2001.
“I have tried outsourcing a lot of times, but it is difficult to achieve long-term success with that in my experience,” Asnes said. “Eventually you have to bring it back locally.”
Although almost all of Lingoport’s customers, such as Cisco, Intel and Zynga, are headquartered on either coast, Lingoport’s developer team is almost entirely in Boulder. Asnes said he completely stopped sourcing his services offshore a few years ago because he realized it often was more expensive in the end. Plus, it’s just “easier to do it all in one place,” especially in a place like Boulder, which Asnes said is a “magnet for good developers.”
But even though the Boulder lifestyle attracts so many adept developers, Asnes said the people who can solve the most complex problems are always in short supply -- in any profession and in any country.
“Even in China, where there are so many people, the smart people there are constantly being head-hunted and they will shift around,” Asnes said. “Your ability as a foreign startup to attract the best and brightest and keep them is very difficult.”
This problem with retaining offshore developers, along with other issues like working with contractors who switch developers constantly, caused Asnes to completely abandon offshoring: “I’ve seen enough to like having everybody together.”
The local development team working on software internationalization has turned out to be the perfect recipe for Lingoport; over the past decade, the team has morphed from a services company that invested its profit into product development to now a company whose revenues largely rely on subscriptions to its products.
Lingoport clients - which span from multinational corporations to small companies quickly headed to global markets - now depend on Lingoport’s software to internationalize their products. The Globalyzer software, Lingoport’s main offering, helps clients do this by identifying local behavior that their products need to take on in each market.
“You may have a font that just might not support Japanese well, but your development team doesn’t really think through all that; our software guides developers through fixing that, but it also gives managers and teams a whole dashboard of everything going on,” Asnes said. “So as they are developing they can see, ‘Oh, I just introduced something into the code that is going to interfere with this market behavior.’”
By providing the Globalyzer product and consulting services, Lingoport has become a quite interesting hybrid company that both uses its own product when delivering its services while also offering its services to buyers of its product. It’s this mix-and-match combination that has made Lingoport the leading provider of products of its kind (i18n) and has kept its big-name clients on board.
“It’s really good for clients if they made this commitment to internationalize and localize their software that they can keep it that way worldwide for all their users,” Asnes said. “That’s kind of our mission: that all our customers around the world have a simple way to constantly develop global-ready software and keep it that way, keep it globalized.”
