Here at their inaugural NEXT event in Las Vegas today, Hitachi debuted their new Hitachi Vantara subsidiary, an effort that’s meant to pull together a broad portfolio of innovation, development and experience from across the company aimed at delivering “data-driven solutions for commercial and industrial enterprises.”
See also: Hitachi sets up IoT R&D camp in California
The new company brings together the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho into a single integrated business, looking to leverage Hitachi’s social innovation capability in both operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT). Hitachi’s Insight Group, its IoT-focused efforts to break down silos across the company in this emerging tech landscape, is itself only 16 months old.
Over a century in the making
“Hitachi Vantara marks a monumental change for Hitachi as we continue to advance our unified corporate vision of Social Innovation,” said Hitachi, Ltd. President and CEO Toshiaki 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.”
The firm has been a leader in OT for industries as diverse as finance, government, manufacturing, energy, and transportation for over 100 years, providing solutions that have positively impacted cities, industrial operations, and businesses at large. They’ve also lead 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.
“First reaction is ‘wow’ and the second reaction is usually ‘didn’t know you guys did that.'” said Brian Householder, President and COO of Vantara. Combining Hitachi’s “broad expertise in OT with its proven IT product innovations and solutions,” the new subsidiary should “give customers a powerful, collaborative partner in data – unavailable in any one company until today.”
Hitting the emerging IoT market
The new company is targeting the emerging IoT market opportunity, in which there is no clear winner yet. They’ll continue to provide infrastructure and analytics technologies, especially focused on their existing data center offerings.
It will also be driving the development of strategic software and services solutions, including Hitachi Smart Data Center software and services as well as Lumada, Hitachi’s IoT platform — now available as a standalone, commercial software offering.
In the same announcement, they rolled out Lumada’s 2.0 release. It’s been fully updated with enhanced artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and advanced analytics capabilities. It also has an elegant, portable architecture that enables it to run both on-premises or in the cloud, and supports industrial IoT deployments both at the edge and in the core.