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Kick-Starting a Software Export Business?
An anonymous reader asks: "I've been asked by my employer to come up with a business plan to sell a software product of ours overseas. We are a fairly well-known Korean telecom operator, but have little presence overseas, and this is our first internally developed software product -- an e-learning management system. We believe South Asia and the U.S. will be strong markets, and that the product itself is competitive feature-wise. What is the best strategy to use to break into overseas markets? How should we go about finding distributors, and what sorts of partnership models should we expect?"
I'm from a software development company in South Africa, we target an international market (selling industrial software). We tried a method of using distributors in different countries, but it was actually much harder to get them to contact customers than it was to find the customers over the web. Our biggest customers / potential customers have been the ones that have come to us over the web. The reason? We have a good, simple web site with lots of product info and all the documentation for our products, so if people are searching they find it easily and can see that it's what they want. I would say use distributors if neccessary for the actual wrapping up of the sale, but don't expect them to generate sales for you, just put the effort in on your web site.
OK, to answer your questions:
1) You figured it out, we are the Korean telco
2) It is a web-based system that supports a bunch of different content formats and database backends. It is designed to be used in a large enterprise, and is correspondingly expensive -- several tens of thousands of U.S. dollars for a licence of several hundred users. A comparable product would be Saba or IBM Mindspan -- although we are somewhat less expensive.
3a) See 1
3b) Good question. The system is suitable for both corporate and public users, but our only current customer (other than ourselves) is a large government department.
We figure target customers will depend on the country. For example, the IT training sector is growing quickly in India and those companies could make use of this type of software. Generally though, financial companies, tech companies, and government departments will probably make sensible targets for this type of solution.
6) Yes, we support Unicode. For much of S. Asia though (e.g. Malaysia, Singapore, India), English is good enough.
By the way, I should problably point out that I consider South Asia to mean south of China. I would consider China, Japan, Korea, etc to be North or East Asia.