Globalization services provider SDL and XML authoring software provider Astoria have partnered to help Siemens Medical Solutions save an estimated $1 million on localization costs, according to this press release.

There were two interesting items in the release worth mentioning...

• DITA is being used. DITA is the hot new XML flavor that was recently open sourced by IBM and now being adopted by major software vendors. It's nice to see a real world example of DITA being used successfully. I'm sure we're going to see many more such case studies. DITA appears to be benefiting on two growing needs in corporations these days: the "chunking" of content for reuse across media and the translation of content for global communication.
• Siemens Medical publishes 190,000 product manuals annually in 18 languages. Given such volume it's easy to see how tools, well implemented, can quickly add up to significant savings. Siemens says it now be able to update technical content on a weekly basis instead of only twice a year.