GitHub, the world’s largest code repository, is big in Japan. At a press conference in Tokyo today, co-founder and CEO Chris Wanstrath (pictured above left) announced the opening of the company’s first overseas office in the Japanese capital. He also confirmed that Japan is GitHub’s biggest market outside of the US.
“We’re excited to be here because the Japanese open-source community has always been very vibrant and Japan has always been one of the top 10 countries with the most participation on GitHub,” he told the assembled members of the press. “We don’t break out specific numbers, but we think Japan will be our number two – I mean, it already is our number two market – so a substantial amount of business is already here and we expect it to grow further.”
Founded in 2008, the San Francisco-based company is entering Japan through a partnership with Macnica Networks, which will oversee enterprise sales, localization, and technical support in the country. The partnership will also allow enterprise users to pay in Japanese yen.
Daisuke Horie (pictured above right), GitHub Japan’s general manager, revealed that the company already counts Yahoo Japan, Hitachi, CyberAgent, Cookpad, DeNA, and Gree as corporate clients. Additionally, the company is working with the startup-loving city of Fukuoka after successful collaborations with the US federal government and the city of Philadelphia. Horie shared the latest user statistics for GitHub at large: 9.7 million users and 23.3 million projects worldwide as of this month.
“From the enterprise side of things, Japan has been number two basically forever,” Scott Chacon, GitHub’s CIO, told Tech in Asia in a private interview after the announcement. “There’s always been strong interest in locally-installable software in Japan. As far as usage of GitHub.com, that’s been number two since pretty much the beginning because of the Ruby community, which has always been huge in Japan. It started in Japan, so it just followed that people here caught on to GitHub.”
Chacon says that GitHub Japan’s new office has “room for 10 desks” but only four are filled at launch. “GitHubbers travel a lot, so it’s nice to have a hub in Asia to work out of when they’re here,” he adds. “Hopefully we’ll be able to take part in more conferences and events in Asia.”
Is GitHub planning to expand its business into other Asian cities? Not quite yet. Chacon explains:
This is a new model for us, the partnership model, so we want to make sure we do it well and serve our existing customers well […] before opening other offices and trying this model elsewhere. All of APAC is interesting to us, and this marks more of a concentration in [the region] by having a headquarters closer to all of it.
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