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Hitachi Ltd launched Hitachi Vantara, a new business entity to leverage the broad portfolio of innovation, development and experience from across Hitachi Group companies to deliver data-driven solutions for commercial and industrial enterprises. This new company will unify the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho into a single integrated business as Hitachi Vantara to capitalize on Hitachi’s social innovation capability in both operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT). Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., helps data-driven leaders find and use the value in their data to innovate intelligently and reach outcomes that matter for business and society. Srinivas Rao, Sales Director – Government Sector, Hitachi Vantara, shares the roadmap and opportunities for the company, in an interview with T. Radhakrishna of Elets News Network (ENN).

 Give us an overview of Hitachi Vantara. How significant is the development of launching a dedicated venture Hitachi Vantara?

It signifies a lot. Hitachi has been a leader in OT for industries such as finance, government, manufacturing, power/energy and transportation for over 100 years, providing solutions that have positively impacted cities, industrial operations and businesses at large. The company has also been a leader in IT for over 50 years—bringing IT applications, analytics, content, cloud, and infrastructure solutions to market that have transformed the way enterprises do business. Combining Hitachi’s broad expertise in OT with its proven IT product innovations and solutions, Hitachi Vantara gives customers a powerful, collaborative partner in data – unavailable in any one company until today.

Hitachi has been helping customers harness the power of their data to support meaningful business action for years. Now as the world is being transformed by digital tools and processes, we are unifying our strongest digital solutions companies together as a new Hitachi company that delivers exponential business impact for our customers and the betterment of society. The formation of Hitachi Vantara underscores Hitachi’s commitment to collaborative creation with customers and partners, and being a true innovation partner for the era of IoT.

Hitachi Vantara is uniquely able to help customers extract all the value their data has to offer. By bringing new data-driven solutions and services to market, Hitachi Vantara will help its customers achieve tangible outcomes that positively drive business and society forward.

The market opportunity for mission-critical data solutions has never been greater. Data has become a businesses’ greatest asset—if they can extract actionable insights from it. Data holds the key to new revenue streams, better customer experiences, improved market insights and lower costs of doing business. However, a comprehensive offering has yet to emerge that combines both OT and IT expertise to uncover its true potential—until now.

Hitachi Vantara will continue to provide superior infrastructure and analytics technologies that enterprises rely on for their mission-critical data in their data centers, in the cloud and at the edge of new innovations. The new company is targeting the emerging IoT market opportunity, in which there is no clear winner yet.

Hitachi Vantara will continue to develop the trusted data management and analytics technologies Hitachi is known for, including Hitachi’s popular data infrastructure, storage and compute solutions, and Pentaho software. It will also be driving the development of strategic software and services solutions, including Hitachi Smart Data Center software and services, Lumada, Hitachi’s IoT platform, now available as a standalone, commercial software offering, and Hitachi co-creation services.

How do you see the Government of India’s programmes such as Digital India and Smart Cities Mission?

With the Government of India talking about Digital India and Smart Cities Mission, I see business opportunities in the Government sector are enormous.  We at Hitachi Vantara see these programmes as good opportunities for the company. We are closely observing the developments in Smart Cities Mission and will surely participate in these programmes under the Digital India umbrella.

What is your business strategy for go-to market for Hitachi Vantara in India?

Our strategy for Go-To market is to collaborate with the ecosystem of global and domestic partners such as System Integrators (SIs) and  Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and together offer end-to-end digital transformation solutions to the customers and also participate in tenders or bids. Our focus is on Information Management Infrastructure and Digital Transformation. For Hitachi Vantara, the India market is a good example for collaborations and joint bids.

Which are the verticals Hitachi Vantara focusing on?

We focus on BFSI, IT-ITeS, Telecom, and Government. BFSI is our biggest vertical, followed by others.

What has been the market experiences of Hitachi Vantara so far?

We have made our presence strong in India by serving global customers here. Hitachi Vantara builds information management and social innovation solutions for business and social prosperity. Our IT solutions and services drive strategic management and analysis of the world’s data. We see business opportunities are growing in India.

The Government organisations are also thinking completely different. For example, Hitachi Vantara has collaborated with Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), a Government of India organisation, to provide digital transformation by facilitating seamless information management in the backend where the EPFO can digitise most of its services. Along with the home grown applications and partners, we have helped EPFO to digitally transform for providing better services to citizens.

We also worked with National Knoweldge Network (NKN) and MyGov.in projects. The NKN is a multi-gigabit, whose purpose is to provide a unified high speed network backbone for educational institutions in India. It is a hierarchical network divided into three basic layers – ultra-high speed CORE (multiples of 10 Gbit/s; Level 1), Distribution (Level 2), and Edge (speeds of 1 Gbit/s or higher; User Level). Depending on the type of connectivity required by the user organisation, geographical presence, and the location of Point of Presence (PoP) of NKN, (belonging to Core and Distribution), connectivity would be provided to the institutes. The network is designed to support Overlay Networks, Dedicated Networks, and Virtual Networks. Advanced applications in areas such as Health, Education, Science & Technology, Grid Computing, Bioinformatics, Agriculture, and Governance will be an integral part of NKN. The entire network will seamlessly integrate with the global scientific community at multiple gigabits per second speed.

Also Read: Hitachi Powering Enterprises in Digital Age: Srinivas Rao

MyGov is a citizen engagement platform founded by the Government of India to promote the active participation of Indian citizens in their country’s governance and development. It is also aimed at creating a common platform for Indian citizens to “crowdsource governance ideas from citizens”. The users shall be allowed to discuss and to contribute on various government projects and plans. It also allows users to upload documents in various formats. The website is hosted and managed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC).

For NKN, Hitachi Vantara has provided the digital transformation platform and for MyGov.in, we worked closely with NIC, in hosting the platform and managing the applications as well. For this project, Hitachi Vantara has provided backend information and infrastructure layers, that helps to store, protect and retrieve data, as and when it is required, and provides seamless access to information.

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