A New Digital Company Committed to Solving the World’s Toughest Business and Societal Challenges
Today customers in India understand that data is the currency of the future, making it the greatest asset of any organization. The launch of Hitachi Vantara is an important step to being the complete data solutions provider, enabling customers to digitally transform their business.
Infact, Digital India, Smart Cities Initiative, Make in India will be the biggest enablers of Analytics, IoT and AI over the next couple of years enabling a digital revolution in India with experience, expertise and an innovation edge. The company is uniquely able to help customers extract all the value their data has to offer. By bringing new data-driven solutions and services to market, it will help its customers achieve tangible outcomes that positively drive business and society forward.
The Opportunity in Data
Data has become a businesses’ greatest asset—if they can extract actionable insights from it. Data holds the key to new revenue streams, better customer experiences, improved market insights and lower costs of doing business. However, a comprehensive offering has yet to emerge that combines both OT and IT expertise to uncover its true potential, until now.
Hitachi 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. Combining Hitachi’s broad expertise in OT with its proven IT product innovations and solutions, Hitachi Vantara gives customers a powerful, collaborative partner in data – unavailable in any one company until today.
BW Cio in conversation with Vivekanand Venugopal, VP & GM – India, Hitachi Vantara talks to us about the venture and his views on India’s IOT development in the coming years.
1)What according to you is the principle belief and strategy of this new venture?
Our vision is centred on data. Data is the new currency and the greatest asset for customers, if you can understand and exploit it. It reveals the path to innovation and creates a competitive advantage to win in today’s data driven economy. In the future, this digital company will become a key digital asset to execute Hitachi’s social innovation strategy. Nobody has the combination of IT and OT expertise, along with the existing technology assets and domain expertise as Hitachi. We’ve had 107 years to develop the most capable operational technologies in industries such as finance, government, manufacturing, energy, water and transportation, and 58 years to optimize information technology to handle mission-critical data at some of the world’s largest companies. Because of this long-established expertise, we are able to help our customers use data as a competitive advantage in ways no other company can. Whether it be business, human or machine data in transportation, telecom or manufacturing, we combine our years of experience in managing data in IT with extensive domain expertise and experience in operational technology to maximize business value through data insight and drive meaningful outcomes for our customers.
2) What are your views on India’s IoT development and prospect?
India presents one of the biggest opportunities across all economies, and Hitachi Vantara capitalizes on the scale and complexity available in our market. Taking into consideration the flagship programs such as Digital India and Make in India, coupled with the smart cities initiatives, India is on a path towards innovation-led transformation. These programs are the biggest enablers of analytics, internet of things, artificial intelligence and cognitive analytics. In addition to the market opportunity, our business culture of collaborative co-creation enables us to collaborate with our digital integration partners to build new solution offerings and revenue streams that are aligned with customer outcomes. Hitachi has been in India for the last 65 years, driving significant technology innovation and accelerating social transformation by providing technology solutions that power social infrastructure in sectors like transportation, power generation, industrial etc. This is a significant platform for us to build the next 100 years of data driven social transformation in India.
3)How do you envision the future in terms of leveraging emerging trends to augment the brand’s advantage?
Hitachi Vantara is targeting the emerging IoT market opportunity, in which there is no clear winner yet. We aim to be a leader in the IoT market. Hitachi Vantara will help customers tap the full potential of their data by storing valuable data in a choice of consumption models that drives the most value – on-premises, hybrid or on the cloud, while harnessing machine, business and human data across IT and OT environments. Our vision for data-driven outcomes encompasses the smart data center for data infrastructure, an extensive portfolio including Pentaho for data analytics, and the Lumada IoT platform for IoT services and solutions. We will execute our strategy by partnering with our existing customers and solution templates for industrial IoT solutions across several industries including financial services, telecom, manufacturing, government, IT services and healthcare. We will continue to disrupt the market by expanding these solutions to deliver X-as-a-Service (XaaS) focussed on achieving business outcomes for our customers.
Nivedhana Prabhu.
