Hitachi Vantara, the data infrastructure and cloud management subsidary of Japanese mega-company Hitachi, Ltd. has launched its new data strategy and product line around AI, including a collaboration with NVIDIA.
Hitachi Vantara has continued to evolve since its inception, originally named Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), long seeing the strategic value of data. This was seen with the company's acquisition of the Pentaho business intelligence platform, and is seen again with its new AI strategy and its collaboration with NVIDIA.
Key to the strategy is Hitachi Vantara Chief Technology Officer - AI Jason Hardy (pictured above), who has created and curated the organisation's AI strategy and portfolio which seeks to drive targeted AI outcomes by layering industry-specific capabilities on top of its existing AI solution stack.
We live in a remarkable and pivotal time where any business can have access to vast compute capacity, and where the tools and capabilities now exist to unlock the huge hidden value of a company's data. Hitachi Vantara expects generative AI to unlock trillions of dollars in business impact, and some say AI is the most revolutionary technology seen in four decades.
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A company cannot scale based on the heroic efforts of individual human performers alone; it will be those companies that embrace and innovate with AI who lead. Yet, the path isn't always simple. It needs strong partners, a partner such as Hitachi Vantara who brings strong domain knowledge across many industries, along with an extensive background in data and storage.
"The Pentaho acquisition, with our storage and solutions heritage, paved the way for us to have a very good understanding of data," Hardy said. "It put is in a good position to not only say we have hardware, but also we have a good understanding of how we can use your data to feed and power your AI journey."
"We're taking our history of being data-focused to appropriately focus AI safely and securely and meeting regulatory compliance, allowing us to lead through Hitachi Vantara," he said. "We're pulling this all together to have a holistic offering along with our partnerships with global logistics organisations and business units with expertise and prowess across all industries."
It's evident Hitachi Vantara brings extensive capability, both from its infrastructure and data background, but also the sheer scale of expertise it can call upon from inside the wider Hitachi enterprise.
This places the business in a unique position; "customers ask us what are the use cases for AI and how to start," Hardy said. "We're focusing on how to help in a consultative way, to improve in-house operations with things like copilots, as well as embedding AI into our own products to make them more usable and serviceable, and to bring simplicity back with a simpler LLM-style chat model."
"AI is solving problems we've lived with for a long time," he said. "We're building discovery services to help customers ideate and become mature, and build solutions to target into their own systems."
"That discovery service is the starting position. What are the use cases, what are the solutions they're looking to identify? It gives a place to start, bringing the right people on the journey together, and bringing the compliance side and enterprise-readiness."
Hitachi Vantara is engineering a high-performance platform named Hitachi iQ, bringing the fastest file storage it can, while remaining economical, and in collaboration with NVIDIA for the GPUs to drive it.
If your business, like many, is trying to navigate how to embrace AI, Jason Hardy has advice for you. Firstly, "those who innovate today will be more comfortable tomorrow" - so don't wait, but at the same time, "don't try to transform the core of your business. Work on the peripheral," he said.
"Maturity will come in, and over time generative AI has the potential to unlock a ton of knowledge on how we interact with customers and how we build things better. As we mature our potential is limitless."
Of course, this journey must be performed responsibly, and with security. "It goes to the heritage of who we are," Hardy said.
Hitachi Vantara ANZ VP and MD Nathan Knight (pictured below) explains the ANZ region is a well poised to benefit from Hitachi iQ. "We were one of the leaders in public cloud adoption," he said. "We understand the economics of public cloud and our customers have a better understanding of which workflows work better up there in the public cloud, and which are better in private cloud."
"Hitachi Vantara is enterprise=ready and is a vendor customers have consistently relied upon for enterprise solutions," he said. "Our customers can work with a provider with a reputation and credibility."
"The community we have and our really strong partnerships through the technology ecosystem - partnerships with NVIDIA and CommVault and others - puts us in a great place to support our customer's stories."
"Everybody is looking at, and interpreting, AI from their own perspective. They're looking to apply AI to their own specific challenges," Knight said.
"In this space organisations need to continue to work with credibile partners that can support them as an enterprise, that can deploy at scale, and has the building blocks in place to do that."
