Outsourcing Drives Competitive Advantage for Travel Technology Leader
About Lanyon
Lanyon, a leading information distributor to consumer travel sites like Expedia, as well as corporate travel departments, faced a problem familiar to every globally-ambitious technology firm.
Scope of the Work
Their international customers (chiefly hotel operators) preferred to work with the company’s information-gathering applications in their native languages. And when your business depends on the accuracy and timeliness of such information, internationalization becomes a strategic issue.
Philip Blahut, Lanyon’s director of software development, saw an opportunity. More than simply a convenience for their customers, language and culturally-specific interfaces represented a crucial competitive advantage for Lanyon.
Lingoport’s Solution
Blahut turned to Lingoport for several reasons. Like many firms, Lanyon lacked the specialized expertise for rebuilding information interfaces to support multicultural requirements. More importantly, Blahut needed to keep the company’s limited engineering resources focused on core tasks. And Lingoport’s long-standing relationships with leading l10n service providers made the choice simple.
Lingoport’s outsourcing team stepped in to manage the entire internationalization process, including coordination with Lanyon’s preferred L10n partner. “Lingoport’s team was completely professional, setting clear expectations and timelines, then meeting them,” said Blahut. “It allowed me to stay ‘hands off’ in completing the project, and insulate our critical internal resources from distractions we couldn’t afford.”
In short order, the work yielded top line results as well. A Chinese hotel customer chose Lanyon as their information redistributor, in part because Lanyon was the only alternative that supported native-language information exchange. Other Asian clients followed.
“As we expand our global reach, we’ll need more support in converting our applications for world markets,” Blahut asserted. “We expect Lingoport’s services to be a major part of those efforts.”
