Workbrain Japan Kabushiki Kaisha was founded as a partnership by Naoki Iwamitsu, best known for founding Cognos' usiness in Japan and helping drive them to the #1 position in Japan's BI market, and Murray Clarke, a respected Executive Search and recruitment consultant seeking to expand services to vendors that go above and beyond the traditional market entry offering.

While Workbrain Japan has a member network that extends into a wide range of technology consulting areas, the founding team are:

NAOKI IWAMITSU Co-founder of Workbrain Japan KK, and the founder of e-Japan Inc, Naoki was the pioneer who brought Cognos into Japan to subsequently develop the Japan business intelligence market. He arranged funding for a joint venture that would see Cognos grow from humble beginnings to a market leader position prior to its acquisition by IBM. After leaving Cognos, Naoki assisted a number of North American software companies into the Japan market, including PC-Docs, Fulcrum, Jetforms and our namesake Workbrain. In the early 2000's Naoki was requested by Cognos to return and restructure their tier-1 Japanese partnerships, upon the completion of which he took a role leading sales for SeeBeyond. Following their subsequent acquisition by Sun Microsystems, Naoki teamed up to re-start e-Japan under the name of Workbrain Japan KK. Naoki has a rich track record in attracting significant investment from Japanese partners to drive the business of his clients into the OEM's and reseller channels. As a reflection of his rich connection base in the Japan IT market he was a primary member and VP of the Foreign Information Industry Forum (FIIF), a consortium that included all major foreign IT vendors in its membership. *

MURRAY CLARKE A double degree graduate with scholarship study at one of Japan's leading Universities (University of Tokyo), Murray has over 10 years experience in sales and consulting in Tokyo. Murray paired up with Naoki Iwamitsu after spending 5-years to help build one of Tokyo's leading IT Executive Search and recruitment firms from a team of 4 to over 100 staff and a position as one of Tokyo's leading technology recruiting agencies. From embedded software to mobile applications, to enterprise software and infrastructure, this work included a focus on emerging technologies around SaaS and Virtualization. In particular he has a strong relationship with VMware Japan while through this work Murray developed an extensive contact base throughout the IT sector in Japan that is vital in assisting Workbrain Japan to partner with ISV and IHV allies and to find top people for their clients.

TAKESHI KASHIWAGI Kashiwagi-san began his career as an IT Consultant with Kobe Steel and developed his consulting skills with PWC and Andersen Consulting. After building his experience in the major consulting firms he moved to the vendor side as an infrastructure consulting lead at EMC Japan. In 2003 he joined Naoki at SeeBeyond to expand the consulting business as well as sales in West Japan. In addition he played an important role in expanding and managing alliance partnerships - a role he continued at Sun Microsystems following the merger in 2006. Prior to joining the Workbrain Japan team, Kashiwagi-san worked as a Virtualization consultant at Nihon Unisys. Kashiwagi-san has strong relationships with a number of cloud providers and manufacturing customers.

MAKOTO TAKETATSU After an early career as a software and system engineer at a leading Japanese system integrator, Mak joined Candle as the founding person, focused on system management for Japan's large mainframe market. After expanding business for Candle, Mak joined BMC Japan in its early days to drive their technical division. As one of the longest serving members of BMC, Mak's experience includes leading technical sales, services, channel and direct sales, alliances and business development into emerging markets, such as MSP and SaaS/PaaS sectors.

TOSHIAKI EBATA Ebata-san began his career as a system engineer for Prime Computer Japan where he provided system integration solutions combining server and storage hardware, networking and software from various US vendors to fit the Japanese market. After being a leading member in the growth of Prime, Ebata-san joined Naoki in starting up Cognos Japan, where he assisted in localization and product marketing. After 6 years at Cognos he held roles at Red Hat as product marketing in the earliest days of Japan open-source, and Bay Networks where he was responsible for expanding their Alliance organization. Following this, Ebata-san established his own company to consult to SMB`s on their IT and back-office needs.

ADVISORS Workbrain Japan is proud to have the helpful advice of a number of leading members of the Japan IT scene, including senior executives at Dell, VMware, Symantec, Gartner, Forrester and ITR Japan, a leading Japanese analyst firm.

Workbrain Japan is a Tokyo-based consulting company and software distributor with a focus on emerging technology trends. The corporate entity was established in 2009 after operating as a private consulting partnership since 1997 under the name of e-Japan Inc.

Workbrain Japan's information is as follows: