SDL, the leading provider of Global Information Management (GIM) solutions, today announced a revolutionary architecture for centrally and securely managing global content to achieve greater efficiency and interoperability among GIM applications. 

Today’s global businesses have invested in multiple technologies from various providers to address their localization requirements. This fragmented approach can inhibit scalability and customization, which in turn diminishes the full achievement of efficiency gains, cost decreases, and time-to market benefits that GIM solutions can truly deliver.  SDL Common Enterprise Application Framework™ (CEAF) is a new architecture for the visionary GIM Platform™ that addresses these challenges.
 
 “While companies are already achieving significant ROI by adopting a GIM solution, without a standards-based common technology framework, the complexities inherent within the translation supply chain will continue,” commented Mark Lancaster, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of SDL.  “The main goals for the development of CEAF were to create a platform that was open, scalable, and secure. We wanted to enable our customers to plug in their own systems and have reliability and scale, first and foremost. It was inspired by valuable customer feedback, our own extensive R&D efforts, and the acquisition of industry leading GIM products over the years.” 

SDL Common Enterprise Application Framework (CEAF) is a platform architecture for managing language assets across the enterprise. Through one central framework, corporations and vendors alike have access to shared content repositories and a unified experience across all SDL GIM products, from content creation, translation and publication. SDL CEAF provides:

• An open, scalable and integrated framework for customizing enterprise applications and building integrations with 3rd Party or proprietary technologies

• One central location to access and manage all global content repositories, including terminology management, global authoring and translation management

• One open environment for the translation community to plug into, supporting customizations in SDK/API as well as many points of entry exposed via web services

• One look and feel for all applications means users only have to learn one user interface for all their global content requirements

• Security and user management built for enterprise requirements

• High-performance elastic scalability to help scale from desktop to enterprise throughout the supply chain

• Prioritization of tasks and load-balancing help manage the peaks and troughs typical for localization and required for enterprise deployments

• An improved customer experience through the streamlining of maintenance and support

SDL has already released the first CEAF-based enterprise application, SDL Global Authoring Management System™. All future releases for existing and new products from SDL will fully exploit the CEAF architecture. SDL plans to release its next generation desktop translation studio in 2009 and followed by its enterprise translation management system and terminology.

For more information on the SDL Common Enterprise Application Framework please go to http://www.sdl.com/ceaf-platform