Hitachi Vantara, a new data and IoT company, launched at Hitachi NEXT 2017

Practicing what they preach, Hitachi Ltd transformed itself into a leading competitor in the data and IoT space by launching a new business entity called Hitachi Vantara.

Hitachi Vantara will leverage the broad portfolio of innovation, development and experience from across the Hitachi Group companies to deliver data-driven solutions for commercial and industrial enterprises. This new company will unify the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho into a single integrated business as Hitachi Vantara to capitalize on Hitachi’s social innovation capability in both operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT).

Hitachi made the announcement at its first user and partner conference – Hitachi Next which was held in Las Vegas.

“Hitachi is a unique company with more than 100 years experience in OT and 50 years experience in IT, ” said Hitachi Ltd President and CEO, Toshiaki Higashihara.

CEO of Hitachi Ltd, Toshiaki Higashihara

The company has been a leader in OT for industries such as finance, government, manufacturing, power/energy and transportation for over 100 years, providing solutions that have positively impacted cities, industrial operations and businesses at large. The company has also been a leader in IT for over 50 years—bringing IT applications, analytics, content, cloud, and infrastructure solutions to market that have transformed the way enterprises do business.

“We will be able to provide a broader end to end solution and able to provide consulting to delivery… this is social innovation business,” added Higashihara during his keynote address.

He described the key aspects of social innovation business as collaboration, creation and connect. “Sharing and visualising customer issues… we already have this framework. Lumada will connect all your assets…share and connect customer value,” he elaborated further adding that Hitachi’s goal is to be an innovation partner to connect industry, data, people, government and machines.

“Hitachi Vantara marks a monumental change for Hitachi as we continue to advance our unified corporate vision of Social Innovation,” stated Higashihara. “Hitachi has been helping customers harness the power of their data to support meaningful business action for years. Now as the world is being transformed by digital tools and processes, we are unifying our strongest digital solutions companies together as a new Hitachi company that delivers exponential business impact for our customers and the betterment of society. The formation of Hitachi Vantara underscores Hitachi’s commitment to collaborative creation with customers and partners, and being a true innovation partner for the era of IoT.”

Hitachi sees an opportunity to emerge as a leader in the growing data analytics space. Quoting research by Mckinsey, Brian Householder, COO and president of Hitachi Vantara, said that more than 60 percent of companies are still to be digitised and more than 95 percent of data is yet to be analysed in these companies.

“Companies are swimming in data but struggling for information and insights,” added Householder.

He sees there being three vertical silos in the enterprise space that are barriers to digital transformation. These are data and infrastructure silos, organisational silos and the mindset silos.

The first causes massive amounts of inefficiencies and problems, the second and third silos – organisational and mindset – hamper and slowdown the journey to digital transformation.

He sees the key challenges for the new company being how to approach and diffuse these issues.

“Data is at the centre of all that you do and key to transformation. At Hitachi we want you to own your data. We want you to control it, own it and leverage it in whatever you want to do,” he added.

Householder also said that metadata is the new data and customers need to understand that. “Your data will outlive the application that created it and the underlying infrastructure,” Householder stated.

Hitachi Vantara’s name is a nod to the company’s successful history in data management and infrastructure in VIRTUALIZATION and it’s successful VSP platform. It is also a name that represents the company’s strategy for future growth – giving customers a VANTAGE POINT to uncover new insights in data for a competitive ADVANTAGE.

“By choosing a name that is not purely descriptive, we can build on its meaning as our business grows. The brand name is a reminder to our customers and prospects of all the great work we do and will continue to do for them,” said the company in a statement.

(This journalist was a guest of Hitachi’s to their conference in Las Vegas)