Astoria Software Introduces the First Mobile Platform for Component Content Management

Astoria Mobility Enables End-Users to Participate in the Content Authoring Process while Allowing Clients to Gather Key Metrics about Content Usage and Usability

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2013 - Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, today unveiled a new mobility strategy that will enable clients to provide higher quality documentation for their end-users at lower cost and less complexity. Astoria Software developed this new strategy after listening to clients in its target markets, extensive research, and prototype development on a key problem facing companies today: how to use technical documentation to engage more effectively with end-users.

Customer Engagement Drives Higher Revenue

Oracle Corporation’s recent report, "Why Customer Satisfaction is No Longer Good Enough," connects successful customer engagement with higher revenue. According to the report, “81 percent of consumers surveyed are willing to pay more for a superior customer experience.” The report further emphasizes three key points of customer engagement: “Improvement of the overall customer experience, providing quick access to information, and making it easier for customers to ask questions were cited as key drivers for spending more with a brand.” Astoria addresses these issues by extending its Component Content Management System to mobile device platforms so that companies deliver the content that end-users seek while gathering data that improves the end-user’s content experience.

The Astoria Mobility solution pushes content from the Astoria Component Content Management System (CCMS) to an Astoria Reader app running on mobile devices powered by Google Android© and Apple iOS©. The Astoria Reader has three regions: one for content display, another for entering search criteria, and a third for entering feedback data. The Astoria Reader submits this display, search, and feedback data to the Astoria CCMS, which correlates the information and makes it available to Astoria Business Process workflows and the Astoria Reporting subsystem. Nevertheless, end-user privacy is preserved; no personally identifying information is captured or reported by the Astoria Reader.

An important element of Astoria Software’s mobility strategy is a customer’s relationship with its end-users. Hence, there are two key features of Astoria Mobility:

1. White labeling – The Astoria Reader bears the branding and markings of the customer, not Astoria Software itself.
2. Simplicity – A company’s content authors have full access to both the raw and correlated data without the need for intervening Web Content Management Systems or complex website analytics software.

By allowing clients to configure the type of feedback data to capture, and by providing anonymous usage and search data in both raw and correlated formats, content authors will be able to deliver more complete and accurate documentation to end-users, reducing the time it takes to find important information, increasing customer engagement, and ultimately driving higher levels of end-user spending with clients.

“There is no question that technical documentation is one of the most important aspects of customer engagement,” observed Michael Rosinski, president and CEO of Astoria Software. “We’ve been at the forefront of two of the biggest trends transforming large and small enterprises today: SaaS (software-as-a-service) and mobility. We released Astoria On-Demand in 2007 to wide acclaim, and we’re seeing a tremendous reception to Astoria Mobility. It’s interesting to note that Astoria’s architecture, which was designed for enterprise-wide deployments, has enabled us to offer solutions that embrace these trends. I think that makes a favorable statement about the long-range vision of our product management and product engineering teams.”

Astoria Extends Critical CCMS Functions to Mobile Devices

An additional component of Astoria Software’s mobility strategy is to push essential and common CCMS functions to mobile platforms. The impetus for extending these functions to mobile devices is rooted in a 2011 survey published by eMarketer.com projecting a staggering 90 million tablet users in the United States alone by 2014. Astoria Software is the first CCMS vendor to recognize the impact of this trend: users will demand more editing, reviewing, and management functions on the devices where they perform an increasing amount of work. Therefore, Astoria Mobility puts editing and content review functions on mobile platforms so that subject-matter experts can edit, review, and approve content wherever they are in the world. Also, essential CCMS management functions are extended to mobile devices so that content management administrators can perform common tasks, such as approving new-user requests and altering access permissions, without the need for remote-desktop connections to the Astoria CCMS system.

Astoria is an Essential Platform in the GlobalLink Suite

Astoria is the CCMS platform for Translations.com’s GlobalLink® Product Suite. Content authored in Astoria seamlessly flows into other GlobalLink components to be quoted, translated, reviewed, approved, and then delivered back to Astoria. The entire suite of GlobalLink products forms an integrated content experience allowing content authors, localization professionals, and subject-matter and language-matter experts to collaborate in producing the highest quality content for their end-users. With Astoria Mobility, GlobalLink now allows end-users to participate in this content experience, thereby increasing the level of customer engagement that companies need to remain competitive in today’s global business environment. As Paul Daughterty, CTO at Accenture, put it in the February 2013 issue of Information Week UK, “Organizations need to look at technologies that encourage and support business-customer digital relationships, as they are likely to become the primary drivers of market differentiation, strategic growth, and bottom-line profitability.”

About Astoria Software
Astoria Software is the world’s most successful Enterprise solution for XML Component Content Management and the first to deliver both an Enterprise-wide SaaS/On-Demand and an On-Premise approach to structured content management. Cisco Systems, Teradata, ITT Fluid Technology, Siemens Healthcare, Northrop Grumman, Avaya, Citrix, and other Forbes Global 2000 manufacturers rely on Astoria to meet increasingly competitive demands for product documentation—high volume, accelerated time-to-market, and globalized output. Astoria Component Content Management, whether On-Demand or On-Premise, is an enterprise-wide solution for Translation-Enabled Content Management, reducing documentation costs up to 90%, compressing product launch times from months to weeks, and generating productivity and management benefits with its flexible delivery model. Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, Inc., is based in San Francisco, California. For more information, visit www.astoriasoftware.com.

Astoria Software and Acrolinx Announce Strategic Partnership

Partnership Integrates Content Quality Services throughout the Astoria Component Content Management Solution

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2013 - Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, today announced a strategic partnership with Acrolinx to embed Acrolinx’s content optimization software into the Astoria Component Content Management solution. The two companies have also established a one-stop business relationship to give clients of the Astoria Component Content Management solution a single point of contact for using the products and services of both companies.

Driving Content Quality Throughout the Content Creation Business Process

The combination of Astoria and Acrolinx joins together the world’s first SaaS platform for building, managing, and publishing XML content across the enterprise with the world’s most advanced platform for ensuring content quality. Acrolinx now analyzes Astoria clients’ content for spelling, grammar, style, terminology, reuse, search-engine optimization, and simplified English. Acrolinx calculates a quality score for content components that reside in Astoria servers, and that score may be applied during a workflow to automate and unclog bottlenecks in the typical copy-editing operation. The results are significant:

• Localization savings of 10 percent to 25 percent by reducing word count, simplifying sentence structure, and standardizing terminology
• Editing efficiency improvements of 50 percent to 75 percent by automating checks in seven critical areas, including style, spelling, and grammar

Also, Acrolinx’s unique ability to conduct linguistic checking in six languages (English, German, Japanese, French, Swedish, and Chinese) and terminology checking in 18 languages enables Astoria clients to ensure content quality in both pre-translated and post-translated material.

The business benefits are straightforward: Astoria Software’s clients operate in global markets, and the ability to move into new markets quickly is a significant advantage. The Acrolinx technology enhances content quality throughout a customer’s business processes because it works on English and non-English content. Hence, Astoria clients are able to move into new markets with higher quality content in new languages more quickly than their competitors.

“The Astoria Software-Acrolinx strategic partnership gives our clients first-mover advantages in new markets, which enables them to realize higher revenues than their competitors,” said Michael Rosinski, president and CEO of Astoria Software. “We already had several clients in common with Acrolinx, so there was strong incentive to craft a strategy that incorporates both companies and systems. Our clients and prospects will be ultimate beneficiaries of this alignment, and that’s good business for everyone.”

Andrew Bredenkamp, founder and president of Acrolinx, said, “Acrolinx has been a pioneering force in the digital content industry, and we recognize in Astoria Software a similar spirit of innovation. We are pleased to have a strategic partnership with a company that is widely recognized for its expertise in XML content management.”

About Astoria Software
Astoria Software is the world’s most successful Enterprise solution for XML Component Content Management and the first to deliver both an Enterprise-wide SaaS/On-Demand and an On-Premise approach to structured content management. Cisco Systems, Teradata, ITT Fluid Technology, Siemens Healthcare, Northrop Grumman, Avaya, Citrix, and other Forbes Global 2000 manufacturers rely on Astoria to meet increasingly competitive demands for product documentation — high volume, accelerated time-to-market, and globalized output. Astoria Component Content Management, whether On-Demand or On-Premise, is an enterprise-wide solution for Translation-Enabled Content Management, reducing documentation costs up to 90 percent, compressing product launch times from months to weeks, and generating productivity and management benefits with its flexible delivery model. Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, Inc., is based in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.astoriasoftware.com.

About Acrolinx
Acrolinx provides Content Optimization Software that enables companies such as Adobe, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Philips, and Siemens to make their content easier to comprehend, cheaper to translate, and easier to find. Built on a powerful linguistic analytics engine, Acrolinx helps its customers analyze and optimize the content they deliver to their customers. Learn more at www.acrolinx.com.

About TransPerfect
With annual revenues of more than $350 million, TransPerfect is the world's largest privately held provider of language services and technology solutions. From offices in more than 80 cities on six continents, TransPerfect offers a full range of services in 170+ languages to clients worldwide. With an unparalleled commitment to quality and client service, TransPerfect is fully ISO 9001 and EN 15038 certified. TransPerfect has global headquarters in New York, with regional headquarters in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit our website at www.transperfect.com.