Finding ways to sell to DoCoMo.

HOW DO YOU SELL to the mobile giant, NTT DoCoMo? It's a question that plagues any small player in the mobile arena in Japan, but if you're a foreign company that question mark may be followed by an exclamation point. DoCoMo can be a hard nut to crack, but every once in a while, a foreign company comes along that's just too good to resist.

F5 Networks of Seattle is one of those companies. It has 450 employees, including a 15-person operation in Japan, and pulled in $108.3 million in revenue in fiscal 2002. About 20 percent of that revenue comes from F5's tiny Japan office, said Jeff Pancottine, senior vice president of marketing and business development at F5 Networks. Pancottine explained his company's Japan strategy at an event in Seattle sponsored by Jetro and the Japan America Society of Washington.

F5 Networks specializes in application traffic management. In laymen's terms, it makes software to control Internet traffic, content and security and helps limit bandwidth congestion and speed up servers. The company was founded in 1996, but didn't go to Japan until 1999. "We were late to the market," Pancottine told the crowd of almost 100. So what's the secret to doing business with DoCoMo, or any other Japanese client, for that matter? "You have to have a unique solution and get designed in," he said. "It's a very technical audience that you are selling to. They love technology and want to understand it and internalize it."

In Japan, F5 "started out in the wireless space and moved out from there," said Pancottine, adding that "in the US, it's the other way around." The benefits of that strategy have been many, he says, since Japan is the world leader in mobile Internet usage. "We are now leveraging everything we've done in Japan in other markets."

F5, which won a Best New Product award at Wireless Japan 2002, also works closely with Tokyo Electron. Pancottine says the key to success in Japan's wireless sector is partner selection ("It's important to have a good partner who understands how American high-tech companies do business"), Having an easy-to-understand channel program, giving the local subsidiary some autonomy and, perhaps more than anything else, quality. "They don't like problems," he said of his Japanese partners. "Obviously, everyone has problems. It's a matter of how quickly you fix them and how many you have."

And one more thing: DoCoMo officials say that F5 has some of the best drinkers in the business.