Matthew :
I had to deal with some regional installations across the Americas, and
I personally prefer Consolidation on a single site.
But ... there may be some good practical reasons to keep servers apart :
a) Politics. Some branches simply prefer to keep their own information
locally. They fear that their IT jobs may eventually be in danger, and
sometimes feel unconfortable on giving all their data to a single
country (usually US), and often pose the 'single failure point' weakness:
if Central branch is down, no one will work!
b) Localizations. It's difficult to implement a single support point
for N regions with very different functional and language needs.
For example, imagine localizations and taxes in English and Japanese.
c) Redundancy. However, this pops up a new question : how to replicate?
d) Alphabetic issues. On some OS/DBMS platforms it can be a hell to
support different page codes : 'kanji', 'katakana' and 'hiragana'
for Japanese guys; Extended Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters
for Europeans; Latin alphabet for USA, plus the multiplicity of
languages and regional settings.
Unicode solves the glyph (symbol) issue but not the plurality of
languages, pathcodes, data dictionaries, number formatting, dates, etc.
OneWorld does a mess with English + Spanish or English + Portuguese,
I can't imagine how would it be English + Spanish + 3 Japan 'kana' + ...
I think it's interesting to hear opinions from other consultants that
had to support multinational installations.
Best regards, Sebastian Sajaroff
