Alis Technologies: Maverick à la canadienne
Process also holds a revered place at Alis. For Faubert, process analysis and implementation is a daily, dynamic endeavor. He flinches at the the term "taylorization" but admits that applying scientific methods to an otherwise "soft" undertaking like human communications can be beneficial.
"A discrete analysis once a year" is not enough, he says. "It takes a lot of effort. There's not a lot of difference maybe between the performance of the best. To be the best, requires a lot of energy, day to day efforts, the small things that we do regularly, that's what counts, that's what makes the difference."
Today, with a world-wide staff of 130, 35 devoted to R&D and 25 devoted to globalization, Alis is fast reaching its goal of becoming a full-service, one-stop localization provider. Two recent transactions have brought the company closer to that goal.
Last fall, Alis acquired Montreal-based Walter Ego. Walter Ego, with Faubert at the helm, had been Alis' primary vendor for localization and translations services. Faubert grins when asked about the acquisition. "They liked us so much, they bought the company."
In February, Alis signed a joint venture agreement with Versacom. Also Montreal-based, Versacom specializes in small-scale, high volume, multilingual corporate content. The formal alliance with Alis, whose specialties include large-scale, multilingual technical projects, makes synergistic good sense. Both companies offer content authoring in their respective concentrations.
Expansion is also part of Alis' strategy. Currently, the globalization division employs 25 but plans to increase that number to 100 by the end of the year and to 500 by 2003. The company plans to grow geographically increasing its presence in the United States and Europe this year and expanding to South America and Asia in 2002.
Taken together, Alis has all the earmarks of a company set for an initial public offering. In response to a direct question whether the company planned to go public, Faubert answers, "Yes, that's the idea."
Faubert shares and even personifies the company's ambitions. "If you have a vision, if you're driven and you have good people with you, and those people work within a good framework, good processes and you keep customers happy, wild things happen. Even if you think big, bigger things could happen. It's a well-known fact that reality surpasses fiction."
I would like to all those in the Montreal localization community for taking the time to participate in a series of interviews over the last few months. Specifically, Luc Faubert
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