Hitachi Vantara’s services portfolio and as-a-services capabilities are not new, but they are being significantly expanded, with a key being the integration of REAN Cloud into the portfolio.
Hitachi’s Brad Surak onstage at the event
LAS VEGAS – The Hitachi Vantara NEXT event here emphasized how each of the three elements of their solution offerings – core, edge and cloud – worked together to provide an end-to-end set of offerings. Both the core and edge portfolios received major product refreshes, with the announcement of the VSP 5000 array and the Lumada 3.0 IoT platform respectively. While there were some new additions to the services portfolio, the big news here was really its coming out as a major port of the Hitachi Vantara Solution set. The company announced that the REAN Cloud technology acquired in 2018 has been fully integrated, and its application modernization services now play a key role within the overall cloud services portfolio.
“Last year, we invested in REAN and now we have world-class cloud capabilities to support you on your cloud journey and manage the complexities of cloud for you,” Brad Surak, Hitachi Vantara’s chief product and strategy officer, told his keynote audience.
“Hitachi traditionally has had professional services and managed services for any kind of solution we sold,” said Manoj Raisinghani, Vice President, Global Services Marketing at Hitachi Vantara. “That’s part of our heritage – the services around the data infrastructure. However, as analytics around the data became more important, we extended the discussion to how you take value out of the data. The Hitachi Enterprise Cloud provides fully managed, smart data centre services – storage as a service, data protection as a service, and cloud operations. It’s becoming a differentiator for us.”
Now REAN has been completely integrated into Hitachi Enterprise Cloud to enhance Hitachi Cloud Services significantly.
“We brought in REAN because it allows us to look at the application flow and see which applications need to be migrated in the world of cloud,” Raisinghani said. “It brought a system integration play, a solution and development play and a managed services play in the application space. We took all these pieces and have integrated the engine. The integration continues, but today we can confidently say the entire platform has been integrated into Hitachi Cloud Services.”
The jewel in the crown here is the Hitachi Cloud Accelerator Platform, which is delivered as a managed service using the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud.
“Our flexible managed services include the Hitachi Cloud Accelerator platform,” Surak said. “This is our secret sauce. It accelerates applications by automating migration to cloud native services.”
“We decided we would take the joint capabilities around migration, acceleration and application modernization to market around the brand of the Hitachi Cloud Accelerator Platform,” Raisinghani stated. “We didn’t want to distract the market so we have put it all under one banner. REAN is one part – a key part – the application layer.”
The Hitachi Cloud Accelerator Platform has also added support for Microsoft Azure with this release.
Specific enhancements were announced for the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud as well, including support for a single pane to manage private and public cloud resources delivered as part of Hitachi managed services.
“Everyone has had some kind of a cloud strategy – first as an infrastructure play, then a platform, now both plus apps,” Raisinghani said.” As companies modernize and move into the public and private cloud, we wanted to enhance support for cloud services in both private and public clouds.
Other enhancements to the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud include adding VMware cloud solutions including VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Enterprise PKS and VMware Cloud on AWS to its pre-engineered and pre-designed catalog framework.
Finally, Hitachi Vantara also introduced Hitachi Flex Consumption, a new consumption-based model, although it was downplayed at the NEXT event itself.
“We are bringing the consumption model in slowly because we have been in this as-a-service market for some time now,” Raisinghani indicated. “We had as-a-service two and a half years ago. We didn’t want people to think we were relaunching it. We are adding a few more things, and are now extending the entire portfolio under this umbrella. We had data protection and storage as-a-service before – and that was it. Now we are extending our cloud services more broadly.”
Hitachi Vantara cloud services and Hitachi Enterprise Cloud enhancements are available now.
