Enterprise IT News:
Hitachi Data Systems’ APAC SVP and GM, Neville Vincent said, “Our ability to leverage our knowhow that is growing every day, is the basis of our core strength.”
But how well will these solutions take, outside of the land of the rising sun? For example, predictive maintenance technology comprises of the collection of operational log data from facilities and equipment at manufacturing sites, applying analytics to it, and trying to predict anomalies before actual equipment breakdown.
What this solution proposes to do may not be so very different from what another solution from another vendor is saying, so what is Hitachi’s unique advantage going to be, as they go to governments and enterprises with their social innovation solutions?
Repeatable. But First, A Restructuring…
Last May, Hitachi Data System (HDS) expanded upon its role of providing converged integrated applications and big data capabilities to Hitachi Limited’s group of companies. They did this by becoming a single entity with Hitachi’s Japan-based IT Platform Division (ITPD), that is responsible for Hitachi’s integrated hardware platform offerings.
HDS is now a 13,000-strong entity comprising of research & development, as well as manufacturing capabilities. With that also comes the engineering team responsible for Hitachi’s Unified Compute platform and Command Suite software.
So, as Hitachi tries to replicate their socially innovative solutions beyond the land of the rising sun, they are taking what they call their winning combo – building and managing machines, deep domain expertise, IT, hardware and software, systems integration and cloud services – to build repeatable solutions across different verticals, use cases and countries.
According to Vincent, the fundamental process and workflow of these social innovation solutions, are similar – ingest, data analysis and forecast, results and outcomes, store, manage and search data.
But since May, HDS’s transformation from being just a storage provider continued evolving to them now also offering mobility, content management, cloud, converged infrastructure and more.
Singapore, The Launch Pad
In Singapore, the Economic Development Board (EDB) has aspirations for Singapore to be the first launch location for urban solutions, before they are released to the rest of Asia.
EDB’s Assistant Managing Director, Lim Kok Siang had said during his keynote speech that tech vendors like Hitachi were welcome to join to create more future-ready solutions, and shared that Hitachi has already poured investments into the island nation, by establishing a Hitachi Infrastructure Group, expanding their data analytics team, and setting up a Southeast Asian centre of excellence for rail signal systems.
Due to Singapore’s ambitions to also be the first smart nation in the world, HDS’s Vincent shared about solutions that Hitachi’s group of companies can offer SIngapore in the areas of healthcare, public safety, connected cars, smart exploration and production of energy sources, network bandwidth analytics for telcos and even IT log analytics for manufacturing.
Despite being disparate projects, Hitachi envisions that all these could be placed on top of a common architectural framework that allows interoperability as well as repeatable and reliable analytics capability, creating a kind of smart city operating system, as a result.
Hitachi In Southeast Asia
During the one-day forum, Hitachi’s joint venture with Sunway, also held a briefing about their latest acquisition – the Singapore-based i-Net Singapore.
CEO of Hitachi Sunway Information Systems (HSS), Cheah Kok Hoong foresaw that post-merger activities would take about a year to stabilise, although the eventual end state of the organisation overall, would depend on what customers want. He also admitted that there may be ‘casualties’ along the way, for example when trying to harmonise HSS’s pool of engineers with i-Net’s.
He said, “i-Net has deep domain expertise in end-to-end security and networking, specifically software defined networking (SDN). As of now, i-Net has it all. We strongly believe what they bring complements well with HSS’ existing portfolio.
“The major goal of this merger is to create a big one-stop ICT solutions provider to be reckoned with, in the region,” said Cheah.
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