Globalization imposes both technical and organizational challenges. Coordinating sales to foreign customers and purchases from foreign suppliers, allocating marketing resources and managing channels are the three greatest hurdles for companies, says Rosenthal. A Web site is a company's face to the world. Rather than going it alone, many companies find channel partnerships, mergers or even acquisitions as the ideal way to gain a foothold in new markets. Others are turning to specialist localization firms such as Sapient, SDL International, Idiom Inc. or Global Sight Corp. to handle multilingual content and workflow issues.
Cultural differences can make or break fast-growth companies.
Simnett believes that companies can help themselves by hiring people who are multilingual and have experience of working in different cultural environments. Don't think you can take short cuts. Dermot McGrath is a Paris-based freelance journalist specializing in IT, Internet and new economy issues. He is a previous editor of The Echo newspaper, based in south Dublin, Ireland and has written for a wide range of European and U.S. publications, including ComputerWorld, Intraware and Tornado-Insider .