Is it effective to have intro pages in multiple languages?

Can this improve results in International SE's and enable intl PPC ads?

[kilo]

My company has customers across the world, We develop softwart and have distributors in many different countries. While our site is currently only available in English we are thinking of making intro pages in other language that would link to the distributor sites (Written in their language) and also have a link to the English site(with a msg saying that it is in English).
Would this enable us to have international Overture and Google ads? say for French and German.

And how can this affect our results on international search engines?
Our domain name will remain as ".com" so just single introductory pages will be written entirely in the international language.

So i'm just wondering how effective this is, and if anyone has tried this out before? thanks

[Tropical Island]

You will certainly be able to run ads in other European countries by producing pages in foreign languages.

We have a site in English, Spanish, German & Dutch.

It goes without saying that the main index.html is English. There are prominent links from the home page to the various other language sections.

All the other home pages are now indexed by the search engines and come up for searches in those languages. Depending on the term the main English page may come up but that's no big deal as the searcher will then go directly to the language they want.

You'll be surprised at how many Dutch or German surfers will just stay in the English section as many have a working knowledge of English. This will not be so prevelant in countries like Spain, France or Italy.