Published in Interface Tech News
MANCHESTER CENTER, Vt. ‹ Data processing company Global-Z is relocating for the second time in five years, returning to nearby Bennington, where the company was founded in 1989. The company is expanding to meet demand for direct-mail advertising in Asia, and expects to triple its payroll within five years.
The company is finishing financial arrangements for purchasing land and building a 5,000 square foot facility in Bennington. It expects to be in its new home by March 2002.
"Bennington is really hungry for new business," said company co-founder and vice president of operations Dimitri Garder. "A lot of the legwork is being done for us."
Several state, county, and municipal programs are working together to help the company remain in Bennington County and form part of what Garder hopes will be a critical mass of area technology businesses.
"If Bennington can promote themselves as really advantageous to high-tech business, we'd love to be a part of that," Garder said.
Global-Z began as a database consulting firm. Its clients ran into trouble when entering international addresses into databases that were expecting U.S.-style address formats.
In 1993, Garder said, the company began processing international address data for marketers. The benefit for the customers, Garder said, is fewer duplicates, faster delivery, and fewer pieces of returned mail. "It improves the deliverability of the mail piece," he said.
One of the company's employees works in Beijing, opening up services with Asian clients and working with the region's postal services. Global-Z has offered services in Japan for two years, and the next few countries to see Global-Z services, according to Garder, will be Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand.
Guy Creese, research director at the Aberdeen Group, said there are big bucks in international direct mailing and address handling.
"That's quite a brisk business," he said.
There is room for improvement in addressing, Creese said, noting that even small improvements can have significant payoffs.
"If you can improve addresses by two percent, and you have a million addresses, that's big," he said.
The U.S. direct-mail market is saturated, Creese said, leading many companies, especially multi-nationals, to seek abroad the levels of success they have had with U.S. campaigns.
"The business demand for this is growing," he said.
Global-Z, planning to follow the trend in its sector, expects to add 35 jobs within the next five years, and offer training and internships collaboration with programs at Mt. Anthony Union High School's career center and Bennington College's foreign-language programs.
Wednesday, October 10, 2001
Tuesday, October 9, 2001
Centra takes e-learning offering to China
Published in Interface Tech News
LEXINGTON, Mass. ‹ E-learning software firm Centra has signed a deal with New Modern Technology (NMT), based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China, under which NMT will be Centra's distributor in China.
Centra has worked with a Japanese distributor for its eLearning framework for two years, and has several customers in that country.
In the past year, the company has expanded to serve Australia, Singapore, and India, adding Taiwan, China, and Korea in the past six months, according to Chris Reed, the company's vice president of corporate strategy.
"You really have to start in Japan," Reed said. Expansion to Australia, Singapore, and India often follow, he said.
With the new partnership, NMT will undertake the Chinese localization and marketing of Centra's software, which permits live interaction with an instructor via the Internet using video cameras, voice over IP, electronic whiteboards, and other tools.
Reed said the early adopters of this type of training platform are multi-national corporations, who are frustrated by delays between product launches in the U.S. and training for Asian offices, which often occur several months later.
Reed described Centra's platform as a "control panel around a content window," which allows multiple teaching tools to be used as part of a training session. Reed said this offers value and depth of understanding.
"The most effective learning experiences are a combination of these learning methods," he said.
Market research agrees. In August 2000, Forrester Research published a report entitled "Online Training Needs A New Course." The report indicated not only that lack of interactivity was the key obstacle to online learning, but that trainee resistance is the next largest problem.
Reed said Centra gets around these problems by offering lots of interactivity and with a simple analogy: "a class over the Internet."
Reed said people already have a sense of what a class entails and what it should be like. Centra's software, he said, gives them this without forcing companies to fly trainers all over the world, exhausting the people and the training budget.
With a distributor in China, Reed said, the company has an agent committed to a couple of years of market building, leaving Centra itself to continue working on its software and on other expansions.
LEXINGTON, Mass. ‹ E-learning software firm Centra has signed a deal with New Modern Technology (NMT), based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China, under which NMT will be Centra's distributor in China.
Centra has worked with a Japanese distributor for its eLearning framework for two years, and has several customers in that country.
In the past year, the company has expanded to serve Australia, Singapore, and India, adding Taiwan, China, and Korea in the past six months, according to Chris Reed, the company's vice president of corporate strategy.
"You really have to start in Japan," Reed said. Expansion to Australia, Singapore, and India often follow, he said.
With the new partnership, NMT will undertake the Chinese localization and marketing of Centra's software, which permits live interaction with an instructor via the Internet using video cameras, voice over IP, electronic whiteboards, and other tools.
Reed said the early adopters of this type of training platform are multi-national corporations, who are frustrated by delays between product launches in the U.S. and training for Asian offices, which often occur several months later.
Reed described Centra's platform as a "control panel around a content window," which allows multiple teaching tools to be used as part of a training session. Reed said this offers value and depth of understanding.
"The most effective learning experiences are a combination of these learning methods," he said.
Market research agrees. In August 2000, Forrester Research published a report entitled "Online Training Needs A New Course." The report indicated not only that lack of interactivity was the key obstacle to online learning, but that trainee resistance is the next largest problem.
Reed said Centra gets around these problems by offering lots of interactivity and with a simple analogy: "a class over the Internet."
Reed said people already have a sense of what a class entails and what it should be like. Centra's software, he said, gives them this without forcing companies to fly trainers all over the world, exhausting the people and the training budget.
With a distributor in China, Reed said, the company has an agent committed to a couple of years of market building, leaving Centra itself to continue working on its software and on other expansions.
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