Hitachi is using its three-day event, which continues through Thursday, to outline its focus on data-driven strategies and how customers in multiple verticals are already benefitting from them.
On Tuesday, Hitachi Vantara began their Hitachi Social Innovation Forum (HSIF), an event which will continue tomorrow and Thursday, May 25-27. The event’s theme focuses on how data-driven strategies are transforming industries, predicting the future, and safeguarding society and the environment.
“Hitachi’s focus on social innovation is what brought me to this great company,” said Gajen Kandiah, who joined Hitachi Vantara last July following almost 16 years at Cognizant. “Becoming data driven is the key to powering economic and social progress.
“We believe every organization has the potential to be data driven,” Kandiah stressed. “If there’s one thing we learned in the last year, it has how the pandemic made data-driven leadership an imperative. It exaggerated the gulf between digital leaders and laggards.”
Radhika Krishnan, Chief Product Officer and General Manager, told customers that Hitachi Vantara defines three Horizons that customers may be in as they look to become data driven. These Horizons are not mutually exclusive.
“The first is just keeping up,” she said. “This involves solutions for primary storage that deliver the highest levels of performance and availability.”
The second Horizon is creating value.
“This involves going beyond data management to use data to make decisions,” Krishnan said. “Data quality and governance are massive challenges. In addition to solutions for these container management and expanded AI and machine learning fall into this Horizon.”
The third Horizon is identifying what’s next, and what these things mean. The solutions include things like XaaS, IoT and Edge solutions, and smart energy solutions for energy management.
“As Chief Product Officer, I have two mandates,” Krishnan told ChannelBuzz. “One is to drive more innovation, which is software-centric. That’s where the universe is going.”
The other mandate is providing a business orientation to product design and delivery.
“It’s not just product engineering and management and marketing,” she said. “It’s making sure there’s a business orientation to it.”
This also involves as responsibility for the Go to Market strategy for Hitachi’s Lumada SaaS portfolio.
“Owning a Go-To-Market gives you better accountability, because you have an end-to-end oversight. I’ve owned end to end P&L functions since I was at Nimble Storage.”
While Lumada has expanded beyond its roots in industrial solutions, it is still a fairly specialized product, Krishnan said that it reflects Hitachi Vantara’s overall approach to being data driven.
“Think of Lumada as the data management layer we are building,” she stated. “There are many functions that need to happen in a data architecture , such as ascertaining data quality and cleanliness. We are trying to build a simplified microservices-based unified data fabric with flexibility so that when data has to go through multiple steps it is not handed off from one tool to the other. This is the biggest change we are looking to bring about with this fabric approach. It’s getting traction in both enterprise and industrial customers because you really need automated ways of being able to tag the data. We are also now leveraging more of those automation AI-based techniques. It all adds up to a very significant differentiator for us.”
