A New Day for Hitachi Vantara

Sheila Rohra
Chief Executive Officer

October 31, 2023

The advancing forces of generative AI and cloud are driving seismic shifts across the enterprise. Every business is now a digital business seeking to use data to better understand customers’ needs and make ‘smart’ products that are easier to use and harder to replace. The explosive growth of data imposes challenges on enterprises eager to extract insights to drive business outcomes as data capture, storage and analysis become central to how businesses make decisions and organize workflows.

Compounding these challenges, of course, are the increasingly complex data environments businesses are operating within that are often rife with silos of critical data that are difficult to access, manage, and leverage.

What’s needed is a renewed focus on data, and ensuring the foundational infrastructure upon which it resides is designed for this fast-changing future.

For us at Hitachi Vantara, it has always been about the data. Over the years, we have continued to hone our strategy and commitment around data infrastructure by leveraging our rich heritage in enterprise storage and expanding our footprint in the upper mid-market.

In fact, earlier this month we took a bold step and announced our future direction for what we’re calling the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One. This single hybrid cloud data platform, infused with AI and due next year, will provide enterprises a common data plane that spans across structured and unstructured data – in block, file, and object storage – to enable them to run different types of applications anywhere, on premises or in the cloud. It is designed, truly, to ease business by making data available for better analysis, insights, and outcomes.

For many, such a data platform is the first step on the road to a more integrated ecosystem, one that provides greater access, availability, and clarity to their data. And with good reason. In its recent Gartner® 2024 Planning Guide for Cloud, Data Center and Edge Infrastructure report, the analyst firm reported that, “by 2027, more than 75% of the Fortune 1000 companies will have formal infrastructure platform organizations, which is a significant increase from fewer than 20% in 2023.” *

The New Hitachi Vantara

To operate effectively in this environment, especially as the data infrastructure partner of choice, requires increasing focus – on the business, on customers, and on partners.

It’s through this lens that our parent company, Hitachi Ltd., announced a bold organizational move to re-align and focus Hitachi Vantara on what it does best – design, develop, and deliver advanced data infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to innovate and scale by leveraging emerging technologies.

As part of this strategy, our Digital Solutions services business is becoming a separate entity within Hitachi Ltd called Hitachi Digital Services. Hitachi Vantara will continue to partner with Hitachi Digital Services and other Hitachi companies to leverage domain expertise and specialized services to help customers transform into data-driven businesses that see a return on value through data.

For my part, as the new CEO of Hitachi Vantara, I have the great honor and responsibility of advancing our strong storage capabilities to deliver data infrastructure solutions that can address a wide spectrum of customer needs by providing the data foundation for innovation. Virtual Storage Platform One is only the beginning. We will build and expand into the broader hybrid cloud and data management space with an emerging portfolio of next-generation infrastructure solutions, that are enabled by AI to give customers the kind of advanced accessibility, availability, performance, and management of their data that only Hitachi Vantara can provide.

Our goal is simple: to help our customers more effectively extract value from their data, and, in the face of increasingly complex business requirements and IT environments, to spur innovation.

As part of this renewed focus, we will continue to empower our extensive partner ecosystem to co-create and jointly deliver powerful data solutions that address the heart of our customers’ business challenges.

Moving Forward

With these moves, our parent company, Hitachi, continues to transform its digital businesses to meet the evolving markets as well as customers’ digital transformation trends. As a result, it will be well positioned to provide a comprehensive value chain of products, consulting services, and solutions with Hitachi Vantara, Hitachi Digital Services, Global Logic and other Hitachi Group Companies, as well as our broad partner ecosystem, to identify and support the end-to-end digital transformation and innovation opportunities of its global customers while contributing to a more sustainable society.

It’s truly an exciting time to be in this industry and driving growth and innovation opportunities with such a renewed commitment and energy.

* Gartner®, 2024 Planning Guide for Cloud, Data Center and Edge Infrastructure, October 4, 2023.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.