At the dawn of 2004, employees of M2Soft in Yangjae-dong, Seoul couldn’t help shouting with joy at the new that Honda Automobile decided to use ‘Report Designer,’ the flagship Reporting S/W of this company, at its headquarter as well as its worldwide branches. Back then; it was such a rare incident that a company of 20 or so employees was patronized by a global conglomerate such as Honda. After 2 years of endeavor began in 2002, its effort of getting into Japanese market finally bore a fruit.

Separated from Korean Information Engineering in July 2001, M2Soft has been perfected its technology in Reporting S/W sector. A Reporting S/W is a solution that helps its users grasp the whole contents of a report at a glance by putting numeric data stored in a database into various graphic-rich formats such as tables, graphs, charts and so on. Since a long while ago, its Report Designer has received favorable reputation from major domestic firms and financial industry largely due to its forte of perfectly converting raw data into Excel, Power Point and other popular formats without any data loss.

 M2Soft was also inevitably forced to seek out foreign markets due to the growing competition among providers as well as limited size of domestic market. The first target market was Japan. The company believed its Report Designer had enough competitive edge since detailed representation was its known strength, and visual aspect of a report such as tables and graphs played a vital role in Japanese company reporting.

However, Japanese customers cold-shouldered the solution even after the company introduced it to them more than several times through Korea-Japan IT Understanding conference and some other channels. Usual coming back was perfunctory responses saying, “we would look into it,” or “we would think about.” M2 Soft CEO, Park Yu-sung, added “it was because although they acknowledged our solution supported wide range of functionalities, they saw only a little merit of it since it fell short on server-related functionality required by them.” They haphazardly jumped into the market without mounting preparatory survey on market preferences only looking at the Japanese Reporting S/W’s affinity with that of Korean. So it had to retrofit its solution in order to accommodate customer requirements and set up its quality standard such as bug fixing all over again. As to the quality, the company acquired international ISO to prove its quality. It really geared up for the Japanese market by partnering up with eCorp having numerous local project experiences.

The first customer of the company finally knocked on the door; a giant general hospital, St. Luke Hospital, was the first pioneer that made the first separate order for a large scale IT project in Japan. The hospital’s attempt was truly revolutionary in Japan where SI companies usually received full-turn key orders encompassing both hardware and software for most IT projects. Most of major Japanese SI firms usually sold in-house developed SW products including a DB, a middleware and a Reporting S/W, and the same business practice was also true with H SI that won St. Luke Hospital project. Report Designer was duly chosen, however, because the hospital made price-quality comparison instead of allowing its SI to tout proprietary SWs. It proved to be a right call that M2Soft waited for a chance while resorting to mutual aid with its Japanese counterparties.

With gained confidence, M2Soft also broke a thriving deal with Honda Automobile by expending its customer pool to large conglomerates. With this Honda deal, the company was entitled to provide its reporting solution to overseas subsidiaries and branches of Honda spreading over 16 different countries. Resupply deal is also expected since the transnational automaker is augmenting overseas installations. This project already proved to be difficult as dominant languages and IT infrastructures varied by countries. For example, because of the right-to-left writing style of Arabic language, reports should be documented in reverse order. Only with newly developed Arabic version, the company could crack this problem. Without any reservation, Honda spokesman complimented this feat saying, “document development period was shortened to one tenth compared to other competing solutions,” and “it’s almost like all the work process would be immobilized without Report Designer working.”

The company was bounteously benefited from the Honda project as it accumulated a vest sum of know-how from redeveloping its solution fit for various countries’ IT environments and became capable of coping with new IT requirements. Later, this experience enabled the company to strike a deal for supplying Doha Asian Game Managerial Committee in Qartar with its Arab version.

The CEO, Park Yu-sung, finally added, “we were anticipating more and more new supply contracts with other Japanese IT firms after St. Luke Hospital, Honda Automobile, Saga City and Mitsui Corp. Since our sales effort gained its second wind in Japan, we would try to boost up sales revenues from Japanese market up to about half of total sales.”

Tokyo: Jo Sung Hon (Reporter@digital times)