Hitachi Vantara leverages its footprint to drive further growth

Having significant market presence in the data space through three companies, the newly formed Hitachi Vantara looks to leverage upon is existing data strengths to tap larger opportunities. Bob Madaio, Vice President – Infrastructure Solutions, Hitachi Vantara explains

Please elaborate on Hitachi Vantara’s market plans, and how is the company driving digital transformation.
Hitachi Vantara is a recently formed company, with a combination of three of Hitachi’s businesses, resulting one digital entity. Hitachi Data Systems has a long history of building enterprise hardware and software systems for storage and computing. Hitachi Pentaho is an open-source framework for bringing in and blending a lot of data. Whereas, Hitachi Insights was set up to solely focus on and drive Internet of Things (IoT) platform and capabilities. Bringing these three together, we have become a key part of Hitachi’s overall market in the digital space.

In terms of digital transformation, we are trying to understand how customers are using data and how we can how we can help them, because it’s great to be able to sell computers and fast storage systems, but digital transformation is about putting central to operations. Bringing the three features together, and understanding how to get data off machines, and blend the data and store it, we are accelerating what we can do to build solutions across all of these areas.

How has been the company’s journey so far, after the collaboration?
The journey has been very good. The three companies have been working together; this accelerates the collaboration and changes the conversation that our sales and solutions teams can have with our customers. Since the companies knew each other, it is much easier to bring together the engineers, solutions, and understand how to leverage technology. For instance, Pentaho analytics solutions can be used in businesses in all verticals, but we are even finding ways to bring it to our core IT infrastructure solutions to get better information about data centers for our customers – it is helping us find out new unique solutions.

What is the business strategy planned and future developments?
As part of our strategy, the main conversation we want to drive in the marketplace is about how to leverage data, and look at the IT aspect of the business and connect that to operational technology. One of the reasons Hitachi Vantara was formed was that within Hitachi, we have experience of over 100 years in building operational technology systems – we have built technologies for a wide spectrum of industry verticals. There are specific data driven solutions that we found – we can look data from equipment at factories, in order to perform predictive maintenance and understand how to run them more efficiently. This is the kind of strategy that we will begin to discuss with our customers; not just the core IT solutions, but all the system data as well.

Could you shed light on Hitachi Vantara’s focus on IoT, cloud; and how is the company tapping digital workplace technologies?
Both IoT and cloud are architectural disruptions that our customers are trying to deal with. We often hear the industry talk about IoT and cloud as markets, but companies are increasingly understanding that these aren’t markets. For instance, when you talk about cloud, the conversation is about how to use it – whether to use it in all parts of the IT environment, or certain applications and how to build a data center and IT system to take advantage of cloud computing.

Conversations about IoT are similar as well – it’s about bringing data from machines, bringing it in and blending it with business information to get unique value. We can do this in numerous industries; we are focused on how do we look at the technology and capabilities of IoT and our Lumada platform, and how can we apply that for applications and specific customer needs in the marketplace.

What are the key industries to drive Hitachi Vantara’s growth?
The company is going through a detailed review of the market for these solutions. Initially we are focusing on fewer industries. We have a deep history in financial services and we will continue with that. We also have a number of efforts in working with the public sector and government institutions. We are working in the transportation space, which is one of Hitachi’s growing verticals. Whereas, in general sense, we are looking at the manufacturing industry. Additionally, IT and ITeS industry has also performed well for Hitachi Vantara in the India market. Technology companies form one of our biggest customer bases. While we continue to build vertical specific solutions, we are focused on the core IT business, which benefits customers from different industries.

What are the current trends among your customers?
We have clear seen an interest in modernization of data centers. Companies today see the amount of information becoming larger, as they begin to connect systems; they are looking for ways to operate more passively, scale better and get more efficient data centers. Another thing companies are interested in, is protection and governance of data. For instance, any Indian companies involved in business with an European company is subject to their data regulations. Thereby, companies are looking at how can they understand the data better and more.

What’s the company’s approach this year and ahead?
We are doing a few things this year. On our core infrastructure and IT solutions side, we have plans to introduce new technology in the storage space; and build our important markets. We are also leveraging Pentaho and Insights to build our core IT vertical business