The new Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure will go to market through a select number of channel partners, building on the channel focus of the recent VSP Pro solutions.
The HCI part of the portfolio introduces the first NVMe offering, while new support on the CI side was announced that will support very large deployments, and a refresh of the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor’s management and orchestration software was announced.
Hitachi Content Platform, which is fundamental to Hitachi Vantara’s second step in their Stairway to Value by enriching data and providing compliance safeguards, gets some important integration upgrades, but the showier part of this announcement is around the sync variant, HCP Anywhere, which now has an Edge capability that broadens its use case into both IoT and larger ROBO environments.
The upgrades to Smart Data Center follow up a new solution for modern policing, Hitachi Digital Evidence Management.
These new microservices around the Lumada platform are designed to provide maintenance recommendations for industries like transportation, manufacturing and energy, which can be devastated by surprise breakdowns.
With a year in the books since the launch of Hitachi Vantara, and five months into a brand new partner program, the company looks at the evolution of the channel changes that accompanied its own reinvention of itself, and what more remains to be done.
Hitachi Vantara announces enhancements to their cloud vision, with new capabilities around Kubernetes in a multi-cloud environment through their HEC Container Platform.
Hitachi kicked off their NEXT customer event with the CEOs of Hitachi and Hitachi Vantara outlining the company’s vision, and the ability specifically of the year-old Hitachi Vantara to deliver on it.
Pulse Secure is seeing strong momentum in its virtual ADC business this year, with the growth of cloud applications, and is looking to both cloud-focused partners and their traditional partners broadening out their business to continue the trend.
Just in time for SAP SAPPHIRE, several significant new SAP HANA software applications were announced, but that’s only a part of a fairly comprehensive Hitachi Vantara announcement.
Hitachi Data Instance Director, which had been around Hitachi Data Services since 2008, gets an updating from integration with Hitachi Content Platform and analytics technologies which came in the formation of Hitachi Vantara.
Hitachi Vantara expands their midrange offerings for both all-flash and hybrid platforms and extends their flat service model from the all-flash series to their hybrid series as well.
Pentaho machine learning capabilities have been extended with new model management functionality that reduces the amount of time data scientists need to spend manually rewriting algorithms.
Hitachi Vantara will leverage Tech Data’s Internet of Things’ capabilities to a greater extent than before, which is critically important in Canada, where new analytics-focused partners need to be recruited, and Tech Data is the sole Hitachi Vantara distributor.
Kimberly King, who now runs the Hitachi Vantara channel, indicated that the new program will be announced in April and will be rolled out in stages after that. She also noted that it will be very different from the existing Hitachi True North program.
Version 6 of Hitachi Data Instance Director massively increases scalability, and adds role-based access controls and a new interface. Exposing the system with REST API will, however, likely be the factor that makes it more attractive to Hitachi partners.
Hitachi made multiple announcements of significance at their recent NEXT customer show, but they also gave some high level guidance about what’s coming in 2018.
Marcel Escorcio, the former head of HDS in Canada who now runs the new Hitachi Vantara company, discusses why he believes that Canada will be an exceptionally strong market for Hitachi’s increased emphasis on the Internet of Things.
The reseller deal with Dell EMC, and OEM relationship around the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud Container program should significantly increase Mesosphere’s growing channel business.
Hitachi Data Systems’ former channels head in Canada, who has moved over to Vantara, and a top Canadian partner share their views on what the restructuring and Internet of Things re-emphasis will mean for the channel.
