In 2012, as ServiceNow prepared for its IPO roadshow, one question kept surfacing from investors and analysts alike: “When are you going to expand into Asia?” The company had already passed $100 million in revenue, but had virtually no presence in the region. And with Gartner pegging the TAM for IT service management at under $1 billion, skepticism was building.
Jimmy Fitzgerald, then leading post-sales globally for the newly public-bound company, saw an opening. Over breakfast with CEO Frank Slootman and President David Schneider, he pitched himself as the man to take ServiceNow into Asia Pacific and Japan. Within 48 hours, he had the job.
The Five-Year Plan and Year 1-2 Priorities
By the time Fitzgerald relocated to Singapore in 2013, ServiceNow had little more than a handful of staff in Australia and under $5M in regional revenue. Japan, meanwhile, had no team or legal entity. But he knew Japan had the second‑largest IT budget outside the US (which largely holds even today).
Before ServiceNow, Fitzgerald had cut his teeth at Siebel Systems, the early CRM pioneer. He rotated through Australia, Japan, and Singapore, eventually running a $250M services P&L globally. In that period he saw how Siebel’s founder, Tom Siebel, made Japan the company’s first subsidiary outside the US, influenced by Oracle’s unusually deep presence in Japan. Fitzgerald carried that insight forward and kicked off the process to launch a ServiceNow KK in Tokyo immediately.
From day one, he framed a five‑year plan with a simple, audacious regional goal: Japan would become the highest revenue engine in APJ by the end of year five. “We weren’t coming for a day or a week or a month. We were coming for decades,” he recalls. To get there, Fitzgerald set three highest priorities for the first couple of years:
- Find the right founding team in Japan.
- Identify and secure landmark customers in each priority industry.
- Localize the partnership structure to the way Japan actually works.
Pillar 1: Find the Right Founding Team
At Siebel, Fitzgerald had learned that hiring in Japan is not just about skill sets. It’s about earning trust and building a team that was deeply rooted in Japan yet eager to collaborate with global colleagues. Carrying that lesson to ServiceNow, he insisted that the company’s first country manager be a Japanese national who had built a career locally. Many multinationals lean on expats or returnees, but Fitzgerald was convinced that Japan’s long-cycle relationship game demands a leader bred and respected in the local market. After a multi-month search, he hired Yutaka Fujimoto as inaugural Country Manager, then Executive Officer and Senior Director, STU Lead at Microsoft Japan who had already shepherded cloud and SaaS portfolios in Tokyo.
From Siebel, Fitzgerald also knew that complex enterprise software rarely succeeds without a seasoned in‑the‑room technologist. So he paired the country manager with Vicrant, an Indian national who had spent a decade implementing ServiceNow for global banks (and had recently relocated to Tokyo with his Japanese spouse).
From Tokyo, Fujimoto built a six‑person nucleus. Beyond Vicrant, the team had two sales representatives (both ex-Oracle who combined enterprise-grade sales discipline with the ability to navigate chaos), one pre-sales engineer (again, ex-Oracle with extensive experience in enterprise architecture and account pre-sales), and a Solution Development Manager who owned proposals and project setup. Fujimoto put it plainly: “For a foreign company in Japan, the only real asset is people. HQ builds the product but customers feel our value through trusted faces who will be there for you.”
Pillar 2: Secure landmark customers
Outside Japan, the idea of a software distributor in the cloud era can feel anachronistic. However at Siebel, Fitzgerald had learned that trying to “go around” the long‑standing web of distributors and system integrators (SIers) is a great way to go nowhere fast. So the design principle from APJ was simple: adapt to how Japan actually buys software.
Meanwhile on the ground, SIers in Japan preferred on-prem software that offered higher resales margins and implementation revenue than SaaS products at the time. Early conversations were brutally direct. Several prospects dismissed the product with lines like “No one’s heard of you” or “SaaS doesn’t make money for partners.” Without brand pull at the beginning, large SIers had weak incentives to invest in ServiceNow skills and capabilities ahead of demand. The team absorbed the hits and focused on manufacturing demand by capturing a handful of marquee accounts so visible that partners couldn’t ignore them.
ServiceNow’s first deal in Japan hinged on a fortunate alignment of circumstances. Mizuho Securities’ desks in the US and Hong Kong were already tinkering with ServiceNow, while Tokyo headquarters struggled with a clunky rival tool. During their global CIOs event, the overseas teams raved about the smoother workflows they’d found abroad. ServiceNow Japan slipped into the conversation at the right moment.
The first “Earned-in-Japan” deal unfolded on a trade-show floor. ServiceNow had scraped together a tier-2 sponsorship at ITSMF Japan, the tight-knit “family reunion” of IT-service-management pros at that time. Fujimoto delivered a lightning keynote, ran a breakout, and manned a modest booth wedged between bigger brands.
Midway through the conference, Panasonic engineers paused at the booth.
“Didn’t know ServiceNow had entered Japan. We just issued an RFI last month, but left you off because you had no KK. That said, the product looks solid. If you’re really here, can you jump into the RFP?”
Fujimoto booked a follow-up on the spot, dragged the pre-sales engineer and one of the sales reps to Osaka, and spent the next several weeks shuttling to Panasonic, listening, demoing, and shaping the proposal together.
Eventually the bid was awarded. Pricing sailed through because ServiceNow had over-committed value at every turn. The real knife-edge was legal: The client counsel insisted the Japanese version of the contract take precedence, which was unheard-of for most US SaaS vendors at the time. APJ legal lead who was fluent in Japanese negotiation quirks from Microsoft times backed Fujimoto, and ServiceNow even hired a bilingual Canadian attorney to sit in Tokyo.
When the deal closed, Fujimoto could finally stride into prospect meetings with a quiet flex: “A rather large company in Osaka already runs on us.” The room’s posture changed, and follow-on deals got markedly easier.
Pillar 3: Localize Partnerships
Japan’s big SIers needed live customers asking for help. So the team’s first objective was to “fill the pool” through high-touch wins like Mizuho and Panasonic. However, while the landmark customers were still being inked, the team quietly stitched together a partner fabric.
With brand pull still near zero, ServiceNow courted boutique integrators who were willing to commit talent. One of them was a nine-engineer Osaka shop whose new owner wanted a future-proof platform and agreed to retain their BPO engineers as ServiceNow consultants. Another one was famous for “picking a product and going all-in”. Oracle in the ’90s, SAP in the 2000s, AWS in 2010, and ServiceNow became their next bet. They supplied agile pre-sales and post-go-live muscle.
Early success bred curiosity. Hitachi Solutions, known for spotting emerging enterprise tech, noticed Panasonic’s rollout and asked to co-sell into Japan Post (already a Salesforce flagship). Hitachi placed both sales and engineering headcount on the line, providing the glimpse of real scale.
To build capacity quickly, ServiceNow also removed early hurdles in some other ways:
- Training & Certification: In markets elsewhere, certification was a paid business. In Japan’s first couple of years, ServiceNow ate the cost by funding local training, certifications, and centers of excellence for committed partners.
- Support Workflow: Customers could start with a local SI as Level‑1 support, with escalations flowing into ServiceNow’s global support at L2+. This honored how Japanese enterprises like to engage post‑go‑live.
- Success architect: Meanwhile, Fitzgerald and the Japan team believed in the embedded technical account manager on partner‑led projects. Some SIers resisted at first (“that’s not our model”), but persistence paid off and the light‑touch vendor presence helped troubleshoot early, broker tradeoffs, and unlock engineering. Years later, ServiceNow global codified this into their framework.
A Long Game, Not a Land Grab
By year five, the bet paid off. Japan overtook ANZ and ASEAN to become APJ’s top revenue contributor. At global kickoffs, the first‑year silence from Japan on the awards stage turned into a clean sweep by year three.
Behind the scenes, the “Yes doctrine” smoothed the path. “Japanese contracts? Yes. Your preferred partner? Yes. A lower price to get strategic land? Sometimes, yes. Need a technical account manager but don’t want to pay? We’ll fund it.” This wasn’t recklessness. It was a calculated investment to land credible, referenceable wins, then normalize toward global standards once the flywheel spun.
When we asked under what conditions Japan should be the next stop in Asia, Fitzgerald’s answer was blunt. “If you’re measuring on an 18-month business case, don’t bother. But if you can afford to look at Japan on a five-year horizon, the rewards can be massive.”
Australia is the easier first beachhead. English-speaking, culturally aligned, quick to adopt. ASEAN markets fall somewhere in the middle. Japan, by contrast, is a long game: customers want to know how long you’ll be around, who your team is, which partners you work with, and whether you’ll truly localize.
“Trust takes time, but once earned, the scale is unmatched.”
・・・
Who we spoke to
Jimmy Fitzgerald is CEO of Paddle and the former VP & GM for Asia-Pacific & Japan at ServiceNow, where he grew the region into a nine-figure business before rising to Senior VP of Customer Outcomes. Earlier in his career, he led Siebel Systems’ APJ services organisation and held senior posts at SignalDemand and Oracle.
Yutaka Fujimoto is Vice President, Japan and Thailand at DoiT International. He was ServiceNow Japan’s first country manager and later ran Japan operations for Zendesk and SailPoint. He previously led Microsoft Japan’s SaaS-and-cloud push and served in executive roles at Oracle.
