Why ‘Unique’ is the Right Word to Describe Hitachi Vantara’s Digital Opportunity

I am now about a month into my tenure as Hitachi Vantara’s CEO and you can probably guess the questions stakeholders are asking me: What do you think? Is it what you expected? What will you change first?

If there is one thing I learned from being a part of Cognizant’s rapid growth, it is the importance of listening very carefully to clients, partners, employees, and market experts, before formulating strategy. And that’s exactly how I have spent my time so far: listening, learning and exploring to identify key areas of strength and opportunity. These conversations have also helped me begin to understand how we can deliver more value to our clients.

I say “begin” because I don’t have it all figured out yet, but a few things are already clear to me:

Hitachi Vantara is uniquely positioned to support commercial and industrial enterprises in their digital transformation journeys. I don’t use the words “uniquely positioned” lightly. We may truly be in a class of our own when it comes to combining deep industry expertise with hardware, software and services capabilities. Who else can both digitalize a factory and modernize a data center? Who else can bring expertise in managing electric power grids and offer analytics tools to help people maximize the value of their data?

Of course, Hitachi isn’t the first major industrial company to declare its digital ambitions. Therefore, it is important to outline what I think makes Hitachi Vantara different.

This isn’t merely an aspiration. Our digital portfolio is already contributing to Hitachi’s success. In fact, Hitachi’s IT business (of which Hitachi Vantara is a part) already contributes approximately 25% of revenues and more than 60% of operating profit.

Our focus areas align to unbeatable expertise and an unparalleled history of success. These areas include IT, manufacturing, transportation, smart life, energy and financial services.

We have demonstrated real synergies when we combine the power of Hitachi’s industrial IP with the digital capabilities of Hitachi Vantara. Look, for example, at the work we’re doing to enhance guest experiences with Disney Parks; to modernize London’s transportation as part of the Optimise Prime consortium, or to revolutionize the development of new drugs with Viranova. No other company has been able to deliver this type of digital value to clients yet.

So, what’s next? Where will I take the company from here?

The things you love about Hitachi Vantara won’t change.

If you chose Hitachi Vantara for bullet-proof digital infrastructure from enterprise to midrange, you can continue to count on us to guarantee the availability of your data from the data center to the cloud and to the edge, where we have unique IP. And, you can bet we’ll have the best data infrastructure for handling AI and ML workloads.

If you chose Hitachi Vantara for its great IIoT and data management software, you’ll be excited to know we are doubling down on Lumada and Pentaho as we further enhance our DataOps software suite. A recent evaluation by Forrester reflects the great progress we are already making. Going forward, we will augment that winning software portfolio with the systems and services you need to ensure the right data is always available in the right place at the right time.

And if you chose Hitachi Vantara for its consulting services to accelerate product development, modernize aging ERP systems, or support the creation of data-driven employee and customer experiences, you’ll be happy to know that our consultants are ready and able to help you accelerate your projects. They’ll leverage repeatable solution cores built on our hardware, software and IP to ensure we stay focused on reinventing your business, not reinventing the wheel.

Where will you see change or improvements?

We will be even more client focused and more driven to deliver accelerated business impact and desired outcomes to our clients and partners. Our solutions will increasingly combine the power of our industry-leading hardware, software and services with the unrivaled industry know-how of Hitachi’s extensive ecosystem.

I’m grateful to every client, partner, expert and employee who has already spent time with me and I welcome further feedback. The diversity of perspectives is incredibly important to me so keep them coming.

In turn, I’ll keep you informed of our progress. I believe the best is yet to come.