Hitachi announces launch of Hitachi Vantara for innovations in IT, operational tech

Hitachi Vantara unifies the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho into a single integrated business.

Japanese tech giant Hitachi Ltd recently announced the launch of its digital company, Hitachi Vantara, in India.

Three group companies - data management company Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Internet of Things (IoT) solutions provider Hitachi Insight Group, and data integration and business analytics company Pentaho – have been merged to form Vantara.

Hitachi Vantara will leverage Hitachi’s social innovation capability in both operational, and information technology. It aims to strengthen its position as a complete data solutions provider, enabling customers to transform business digitally.

“We decided to do this unification because when we looked at our customers, we realised that data is the new currency,” said Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and General Manager – India, Hitachi Vantara.

"We needed to follow that data across the value chain from creation to consumption, and it encompassed a data management, it encompassed business analytics, and it encompassed IoT as well. So, we felt the need to bring all these three companies together,” he added. 

Hitachi also announced the launch of its first commercial IoT platform offering, Lumada. The platform has a portable architecture that enables it to run both on-premise, or on the cloud, and support industrial IoT deployments both at the edge and at the core.

The new software stack is designed to help customers get insights on, and predictions and recommendations from their data, and can be adapted to support mid-to-large-scale environments.

Lumada’s integrated advanced analytics have been enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) functionality at scale. The result offers enterprise and industrial customers increased operational efficiencies and cost savings, enhanced operational safety and reliability, improved asset utilisation, and performance management.

Vivekanand says, “Lumada in Japanese means illumination with data. And this is a very intelligent, composable, and extensible platform that helps customers derive valuable insights out of human, business and machine-generated data.”

He added that initiatives like Digital India, smart cities and Make in India were enablers for cloud, IoT, artificial intelligence and cognitive analytics technologies. 

Vivekanand Venugopal

Talking about market opportunities, Vivekanand added, “Vantara has been in operations for the last 12 months. If you look at the execution of the Hitachi Vantara story, the use cases are proliferating at an amazing pace.”

Hitachi Vantara has 7,000 employees, and clocked a revenue of $4 billion in the first year of its operations. 

According to a Gartner report, globally, over $440 billion will be spent on IoT in 2020, and there will be more than 21 billion connected sensors and endpoints, and digital twins will exist for potentially billions of things in the same timeframe.

To address this market, Hitachi Vantara will harness business, human and machine data across operational tech and IT environments to build comprehensive, data-driven solutions, Vivekanand said.