Celonis Japan: The Country Manager Hire That Was Won by a Back-Channel Reference
Celonis’s Japan country seat was won the way the best searches are won: a full market map scored to the client’s requirements, shared transparently, and a client engaged enough to verify the name at the top of the list through his own network. That is what a search run as a partnership looks like.
Celonis is the German company that built the process mining category and turned it into one of Europe’s most valuable software franchises. Its Japan business is a useful case study in two things: how a foreign enterprise vendor earns a market like this one by investing ahead of the curve, and how its single most important hire was actually decided.
The Japan country seat was not filled off a longlist and a hunch. It was decided by a full market map, scored against the client’s own requirements and shared with them openly. The candidate who stood at the top of that balanced scorecard was compelling enough that the client’s Chief Revenue Officer ran his own quiet verification through his network before we approached the candidate at all. The check confirmed what the data already said.
I want to tell that story, because it captures something I have believed for twenty years of executive search in Tokyo: the best senior searches are not vendor-and-supplier transactions. They work collaboratively and transparently, as a partnership, where the search firm shows its full working and the client brings its own network and judgement to bear on the result. That single idea is why TalentHub built the platform it did.
The Context: Why Celonis Treated Japan As A Real Market
Celonis was founded in Munich in 2011, a spin-out from the Technical University of Munich, and it more or less created the process mining category. The software reads the event logs sitting inside a company’s ERP and CRM systems and shows leaders how their processes actually run, rather than how they think they run. By 2022 it had raised roughly a billion dollars in a round led by the Qatar Investment Authority at a $13 billion valuation, which put it among the most valuable private software companies in Europe.
The category itself is moving quickly. Grand View Research put the process mining software market at $1.4 billion in 2024, projected to reach $21.92 billion by 2030, a compound growth rate of just under 60%. Numbers that steep decay fast, so treat them as a 2024–2030 marker rather than gospel. But the direction is not in doubt.
Here is why Japan was never going to be a footnote for a company like this. Process mining sells on a promise Japanese enterprises already believe in their bones: that you improve a business by looking closely and honestly at how work actually flows. Kaizen and genchi genbutsu, go and see for yourself, are not consulting slogans in Japan. They are operating culture. A tool that makes the invisible flow of a process visible lands differently in a market that has spent decades refining processes by hand.
Investing Ahead Of The Curve
Most foreign vendors approach Japan with a chicken-and-egg posture. They will invest properly once the market proves itself, and they test the water with a skeleton team, a junior hire, or an APAC overlay run from Singapore or Sydney. The market, meanwhile, is watching for exactly that hesitation. Japanese enterprise buyers, partners, and senior candidates all read the same signals, and none of them commits to a vendor that has not committed first.
Celonis did the opposite. It opened its first Tokyo office in 2019 and set about building a real local organisation before the Japan revenue line could justify it on a spreadsheet. It put a proven, tier-one country leader into the seat rather than a caretaker. It gave that leader a Representative Director title with the mandate behind it. That decision, to treat Japan as a market to build in, not to test, is the same pattern I described in Wiz Japan and Glean.
The big Japan success cases are not made by testing the water. They are made by investing beyond the chicken-and-egg phase, before the market has proven itself, so that the market can.
The companies that win here tend to be the ones that put serious local leadership and serious commitment in early, and let the results compound. The partnerships and customer wins that followed for Celonis, which I will come to below, were the return on that early conviction, not the precondition for it.
Why The Leadership Choice Mattered
Which brings me to the seat itself.
The person who took it was Masashi Murase. Murase-san was not a first-time country manager taking a flyer on a startup. He had spent roughly six years as Managing Director and VP of ServiceNow Japan, where he grew the business from a small entity into one of ServiceNow’s largest tier-one countries. He joined Celonis as Representative Director and VP for Japan, a title that, in Japan, carries legal representation of the entity, not just a sales number.
That distinction matters more than most foreign head offices realise. In Japan, country leadership is a credibility role before it is a sales-management role. The country head has to earn trust with customers, partners, employees, the head office, and the wider ecosystem, often before the company has much of a local track record to trade on. This is the heart of what we call the Mandate Audit at TalentHub: never confuse the title with the authority. A “Representative Director” who cannot actually decide, hire, and spend is a title without a mandate, and senior Japanese executives can smell the difference from across the room.
Murase-san had run that gauntlet once already at ServiceNow. Hiring him was not a bet on potential; it was a bet on a proven builder who knew exactly what a tier-one Japan operation needed. In the Land, Expand, Lead framework, that is the leader you bring in to move from 1 to 10: to take an established beachhead and turn it into a scaled, repeatable business.
The Search: A Scored Market Map, And A Client Who Verified It
Here is the part I find most instructive. Before we built TalentHub, I founded and ran an executive search firm that became a joint venture with ManpowerGroup, Experis Executive. It was there that we ran the retained search that placed Celonis’s Japan leader. I carried the client relationship with Miguel Milano, then Celonis’s Chief Revenue Officer, today President and Chief Revenue Officer at Salesforce. A colleague on the same mandate worked with the candidate who ultimately took the seat, Murase-san.
We did not bring Celonis a shortlist and ask them to trust us. We brought them the market. A full map of the people who could credibly lead a Celonis Japan business, scored against the requirements Celonis itself had defined, and shared transparently, working and all. On that balanced scorecard, one name stood at the top: Murase-san.
What happened next is what made the search unusual, and what makes it worth writing about. Milano has deep relationships across the Japan enterprise market, built over years running Salesforce’s international business. The strength of the case we had put in front of him compelled him to act on it himself. Before we were cleared to approach Murase-san, he wanted to run his own quiet check through his network: to verify what we had shared, to satisfy himself this was the right person, and to keep the process clean of the ethical grey areas that come from engaging a candidate prematurely. We were told, in plain terms, not to engage until he came back to us.
When he came back, the picture had settled. A respected peer had validated Murase-san, confirming what the scorecard already said, and the check worked in both directions at once. It told Celonis that Murase-san was the right hire. And it told Murase-san, from someone he trusted, not from a recruiter or a job spec, that Celonis was the right move. By the time the formal process caught up, he was effectively committed.
The map did the analytical work. The client’s own network did the verification. Neither would have been enough alone. That is what a search run as a partnership looks like.
Notice the sequence. The data made the case. The client engaged with it seriously enough to test it through his own relationships. And because the search had been transparent from the start, his verification strengthened the process instead of second-guessing it. That is how senior hiring in Japan really clears: rigorous mapping, shared openly, confirmed through networks of trust.
The Public Signals: Fujitsu, NEC, And A Market That Took Celonis Seriously
The bet on early investment and serious local leadership showed up in the partnerships that followed, and these are the signals I would point any foreign vendor toward when judging whether a Japan business is real.
Fujitsu became a Celonis Global Alliance Partner at Platinum level in January 2024, and its CIO, Yuzuru Fukuda, shared a stage with Celonis co-founder Bastian Nominacher at the company’s Munich conference in late 2023 to talk about using process mining across Fujitsu’s own “One Fujitsu” transformation. When a company of Fujitsu’s weight both adopts your product internally and puts its CIO on your stage, that is not a logo slide. It is a market endorsement.
NEC went a step further. In May 2024 it began a proof of concept with Celonis to combine NEC’s Japanese-language generative AI with Celonis’s process intelligence platform, making NEC the first Japanese company to work on that integration. The detail worth noticing is that the work was done in natural Japanese, for Japanese operators: a vendor building for the local market, not translating a global deck.
Marquee references like these are what convince the next Japanese enterprise buyer to move. They are also, not coincidentally, what convince the next senior candidate that the company is worth joining. In Japan the two audiences overlap almost completely. And none of it happens for the vendor still testing the water from Singapore. These are the returns on investing ahead of the curve.
Why This Matters For Other Companies Hiring In Japan
The conventional way to run a senior Japan search is to treat it as a black box. The search firm goes away, comes back with a shortlist, and the client interviews it. The firm protects its methods; the client protects its opinions; references get checked at the end to confirm a decision already made. It is tidy, it is defensible, and it leaves the most valuable asset in the room, the client’s own market knowledge and network, sitting unused until it is too late to matter.
The Celonis search worked the other way. We showed the full map and the full scoring. The client engaged with it as a partner, not an audience, and put his own network to work verifying the outcome before a single approach was made. The result was a hire that both sides believed in completely before the first formal interview, and a candidate who arrived at the table already convinced, because the validation had reached him through someone he trusted.
This is the thing outsiders underestimate about the Japan market. It is smaller, more senior, and more relationship-dense than it looks from a global org chart. The pool of people who can credibly lead a foreign enterprise vendor’s Japan business is not large, and they mostly know each other, or know someone who does. Mapping that market properly, scoring it against what the client actually needs, and then opening the whole thing up to the client’s scrutiny is not a loss of control. It is the mechanism by which the search earns the trust that closes the hire.
Get that wrong and the best-looking candidate on paper stays politely non-committal forever. Get it right and a search that looked stuck resolves in a fortnight.
The Bigger Lesson: Transparency Compounds, In Searches And In Markets
The Celonis story reinforces two things I have watched play out in Tokyo for two decades, and they are versions of the same lesson.
In market entry, the companies that win in Japan are the ones that invest ahead of the curve: real office, real leadership, real mandate, before the revenue proves the case. Commitment shown early is what unlocks the customers, partners, and talent that make the case provable at all.
In senior search, the same logic applies. The searches that produce great hires are the ones run as transparent partnerships: exhaustive mapping, scoring shared in the open, and a client engaged enough to bring their own network into the verification. The back-channel reference that settled the Celonis seat was not a substitute for rigour. It was what rigour, shared openly, earned.
We came to believe that pattern was so consistent, and so central to how the Japan market actually clears, that we built for it. TalentHub’s platform exists to make exactly this way of working systematic: full market maps scored against client-defined criteria, shared transparently, with peer-network validation built into the process rather than left to chance. The Celonis seat was decided by a scored map that the client trusted enough to verify himself. We simply decided to make that the standard, not the exception.
If you are weighing a senior leadership hire in Japan and want the mapping done properly, with names, mandates, scoring, and the network of trust that actually decides these roles, that is the work we do. You can see how we approach it on our executive search practice page.
Sources
- NEC press release: NEC–Celonis generative-AI process intelligence proof of concept (May 2024), incl. Celonis company background
- Bloomberg: Qatar Investment Authority leads $1B round at $13B valuation (2022)
- Grand View Research: Process mining software market forecast
- Celonis blog: Celonis Japan, Tokyo office and market position
- Fujitsu blog: Fujitsu–Celonis Global Alliance (Platinum, January 2024) and Celosphere 2023 keynote
- Celonis press release: Miguel Milano joins Celonis as CRO and Co-Owner (2020)
- Salesforce: Miguel Milano, President and Chief Revenue Officer (biography)
- Masashi Murase, Representative Director and VP, Celonis Japan (formerly Managing Director, ServiceNow Japan), LinkedIn
