Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is celebrating its 40th anniversary in Switzerland this year.
Based in Santa Clara, California, HDS has been well known for delivering high-quality storage systems to the worlds most successful enterprises. In recent years this Enterprise grade quality has extended into the extensive IT solution portfolio offered by HDS. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd, and operate in some 170 countries. Today, more than 100 employees work in the offices located in Plan-les-Ouates, Zollikofen, and in Wallisellen, HDS’ Swiss headquarters.
In order to better understand HDS’ Swiss operations, and how it copes with demanding market conditions, delivering solutions to Enterprises required to meet strict financial regulations, we conducted an interview with Paul Cantini, Regional Branch Manager, and Nigel Fenton, Solutions Consultant.
To explain HDS’ strategy, Mr. Cantini states that, “The Swiss market demands quality, not only in the products but also in services. Today’s businesses depend on IT solutions that deliver an extremely high level of performance, stability and security. HDS offers these flexible IT solutions to support the customers to develop and grow, meeting the increasing demands in terms of availability, investment protection and security.”
According to Mr. Fenton, proactively proposing HDS technologies provides a strong and trustworthy relationship with customers. This is achieved by enhancing the customer experience through all channels and digital touch points, lowering operational costs, and implementing flexible IT solutions.
The Cloud
HDS is well known for its data storage solutions, which began in 1989 when Hitachi and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) acquired National Advanced Systems (NAS) from National Semiconductor, and renamed it Hitachi Data Systems. Nowadays, HDS is recognized as a leading player in cloud computing’ solutions.
Because the ‘cloud’ is a key growth area, HDS recently launched the ‘Hitachi Enterprise Cloud’ platform, which offers all the capabilities and benefits of a public cloud, using a private/hybrid cloud solution.
This technology is based on their UCP (Unified Compute Platform) Converged Infrastructure. It combines the UCP Director software for intelligent IT Automation and uses the advanced cloud and virtualization software from VMware. Mr. Cantini stated that, “Our go to market strategy is very much targeted towards clients who require a strong enterprise grade private cloud, with hybrid cloud capabilities to host both traditional x86 and next-generation cloud native application workloads.”
Their enterprise data storage solutions are located at the top right corner of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, and the company’s goal is to repeat this success in the cloud solution space by producing versatile products. Mr. Cantini emphasizes that their significant investments in research and development provides the opportunity for HDS to differentiate their cloud solutions from other competitors.
When asked about their differentiating features regarding to the cloud, in comparison to other international players, HDS’ answer is the pre-engineered nature of their single platform to cover all workloads and business requirements. Mr. Fenton highlights that in 2015 HDS initiated a joint venture with VMware Switzerland in order to bring a unique, standardized and pre-engineered solution to the market; one that offers public cloud convenience in a private cloud solution.
Additionally, it delivers a high level of automation and pre-defined orchestration workflows reducing deployment time and integrates VMware software allowing an automated cloud platform. These are the main advantages of the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud platform.
Swiss Finance Sector
The finance sector means a lot to Switzerland, where government financial regulations are strict, and guarantees its worldwide respectability. It is a well known fact that FINMA-RS 08/7 guidelines for banking outsourcing might be sometimes quite challenging to meet for international cloud providers, especially for US companies.
For the banking industry, HDS provides not only solutions which helps business to comply to such regulations, using cloud or other IT platforms, but can deliver the necessary skills and experience to ensure competent consulting right up to successful implementation, thus meeting customers’ needs.
For certain types of workloads, they offer fully outsourced solutions, such as for SAP HANA implementations. In all cases, they help their customers and cloud providers to create their own ‘Private Clouds’ by delivering complete HDS hardware and software solutions.
Big Data
The amount of unstructured data produced daily is growing exponentially, and since the IT sector is directing its attention to IoT, this growth will only accelerate. Because of this, HDS has a clear strategy and significant focus on big data solutions and analytics.
When asked about the future of this big data trend, Mr. Cantini and Mr. Fenton explained that the meaning of Big Data is constantly being redefined as new technologies generate more and more data, but HDS is ready to cope with this development. “The buzz around Big Data and analytics is due to the benefits and insights it can deliver to business. Hitachi technologies enable the correlation of multiple data sources which can be analyzed to extract valuable information from this data to benefit all businesses in any industry segment.”
The acquisition of Pentaho in 2015, a leading software solution which covers data integration, visualization and analytics, is certainly a strong confirmation of HDS’ emphasis on Big Data.
“We are looking forward to future IT business in all of these sectors” Mr. Cantini concludes, “and we will continue our success by helping our existing and new customers to transform, grow and succeed. With HDS, you can lay the strategic, operative and technological foundation to being successful in this challenging digital economy.”
References:
https://www.hds.com/en-us/home.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Data_Systems
http://www.hitachi.com
http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/04/28/hds-introduces-vertical-big-data-offerings/#4cadc6ce4e7a
http://www.businessinsider.com/hitachi-announces-iot-group-and-platform-2016-5?IR=T
http://www.bloomberg.com/Research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapid=1006425
Images:
https://www.hds.com/go/mobility-iview/images/tab4-image1.jpg
https://media.licdn.com/media/p/4/000/16d/2df/038b7f1.jpg
I'm quite curious about the future of Pentaho. Will being acquired by Hitachi help it? Or does this mean an end to a really promising solution?
Hitachi is a company with a long history so the former sounds more possible.
Great site, very interesting articles.