Situation1997 to 2000
SolutionThe FirstCall offices in the Japan and Asia/Pacific regions needed a focused development effort from the home office's engineering staff in Boston. The current products were US-centric, and were not selling well in Asia. A decision was made to hire one consultant to work in Boston and serve as a liason between Tokyo and Hong Kong's Product Marketing and Sales, and Boston's Engineering groups.
I worked with the Sales and Product groups in Tokyo (via phone, email, and two trips) and the Engineering group in Boston (on-site) to develop ResearchDirect/Japanese. This web product had a localized Japanese user interface, support for storage of double-byte encoded Japanese text in the database (Sybase, Fulcrum search engine), and support of Japanese PDF files. My tasks included Product and Project Management, as well as programming the character set conversion routines used by the web application, and developing testing procedures for debugging issues related to storing Japanese text in the same legacy database tables as English text.
In order to reduce customer support costs, I worked with the offices in Hong Kong and Singapore to design, develop, and deploy two web farms (Sun Solaris) to Hong Kong (hosted at British Telecom) and Sigapore (hosted at SingTel). These systems enabled Hong Kong and Singapore offices to migrate a total of 150 customer sites off of a legacy client/server (Windows/SCO) application and onto the English language ResearchDirect web product, for a savings of approximately US$600 per month per client.
In order to fully support the global company, I helped to disolve my International Engineering group and mainstreamed the international project development into the core (US) team. The streamlining of the development group enabled localization of the ResearchDirect web product into Spanish (targeted to Argentina), Portuguese (targeted to Brazil), and Korean, in addition to enhancement of the Japanese product. Product releases could now be simultaneously released in all languages on all of the global web farms.
Demo
Self-running demo (3.6 mb) of the Japanese web product. This demo was created in June 1998.