Globalization management software vendor Idiom has been on a hiring spree lately; they tell me that they plan to double revenues in '05 and are hiring field sales and consultants to help make this happen. I must confess that I've had my doubts about Idiom's survival but this development tells me that things are not nearly so dire. They also announced a recent new win from Information Builders.

Setting the Record Straight on Oracle and Idiom

A month ago I commented on the Idiom press release regarding the "new" Oracle account win. I suspected that an overzealous PR department was trying to make an expanded Oracle account sound like a new account.

However, I've been told by Idiom that this was indeed a new account win. The first sale to Oracle was for Idiom's Web globalization software. The second sale was for a different Idiom application; Idiom sells three different applications:

• Website globalization

• software localization

• global electronic publishing

According to Idiom, "The new deal was with a different Oracle group, for a different application. Oracle's Worldwide Product Translations Group (WPTG), in Dublin, Ireland, bought an enterprise license to use WorldServer across all translation and localization efforts at Oracle (documentation, Oracle Univ., etc.). The first license was for Oracle.com only. They were two separate deals, with two different Oracle organizations, with two different multi-month proof-of-concept pilots, etc. In both cases, Idiom and our GMS contemporaries were considered."