Vivekanand Venugopal, VP and GM of Hitachi Data Systems, India speaks out on the company’s policies, strategy and plans for future in an exclusive with Enterprise IT World.
What sets Hitachi apart?
HDS is the well-known and proven name for storage and IT infrastructure expertise which is our mainstay. Apart from this, we have been focusing on diversifying our product and solution portfolios, rapidly expanding our proficiency in advanced data analytics, Internet of Things and connected intelligence.
Customers today see Hitachi as a stable organisation delivering a lot of value consistently. The transformation within the company has put forth a very clear message. Beyond stability, it’s the value of the technology that our company brings. Hitachi offers far better outcomes in terms of helping them optimise their cost with a simple proposition called return on assets i.e. reuse whatever investments they have made. Today our conversations with customers have gone beyond IT. Collaboration with CXO community is vital in terms of discovering new customers, new markets or driving a revenue growth and finding how HDS can enable them through IT platform and solutions.
Current market strategy
Building on our IoT and data analytics market taking momentum in 2016, we have an aggressive rollout of new solutions and services planned. Also, there is a lot of opportunity in the government’s Digital India and ‘Smart Cities’ campaigns, not just as a technology provider but as a social Innovation specialist.
Through recent acquisitions of Pentaho and Oxya, HDS has bolstered its analytics portfolio to further capitalize on Internet of Things market opportunities and expand cloud services portfolio beyond IaaS to Application-as-a-Service.
Doing business in India
Today, India is one of the fastest growing markets with a 40% growth rate. We are focusing on BFSI, IT & ITES, Telecom, Media & entertainment and Government sector among others in the country. We project the next five years to be very promising.
Indian businesses have become more agile, and technologies such as social media, mobility, analytics and cloud computing are coming together to unleash unlimited opportunities for organizations. Also there is demand to come in from various e-governance projects. Additionally, Indian enterprises will be focusing on creating integrated data centres for optimizing existing IT assets and delivering non-stop IT services to business. This will drive greater emphasis on public cloud and software defined networking, and will drive the demand for smarter and more secure storage infrastructure and data management systems.
New Opportunities in IOT and Analytics
Nowadays, customers have implemented analytics and also integrated business intelligence and data warehousing. They are constantly looking for ways to optimize their investments and that is where Hitachi Data Systems comes in. HDS is building a robust analytics framework that uniquely combines Hitachi’s formidable industrial, societal and business expertise with its rich portfolio of data infrastructure and analytics solutions. With our industry-leading infrastructure, content management tools for IT, we have the ability to deliver unparalleled business innovations that integrate OT and IT to distil value from Big Data and the Internet of Things
Performance- This year and next
We have been leveraging the power and technology of Hitachi family and combining them with our IT platforms for the betterment of society. Many government projects like the ‘mygov’ initiative, e-Procure, e-Courts and Central Crime Research run on HDS platforms. Today, 22 states in India leverage Hitachi IT solutions to ensure they have a disaster recovery solution in place. By 2017, we will be rolling out first innovations with HDS label on them.
We’re closely aligning the key areas of our business (HDS, Hitachi Consulting, Hitachi Automotive and Hitachi R&D, etc.) to extend and accelerate our leadership. In 2016, HDS will be focusing in 3 areas i.e. revenue growth, portfolio growth including analytics and IoT solutions and co-creating solutions with our system integrators and regional system integrators
Importance of digitally savvy workforce
The enterprise business of today demands constant communication to keep the work moving. Harnessing digital transformation for productivity involves creating a workplace culture where the digital generation can thrive. They need to be empowered with new digital tools for collaboration and workplace productivity. Businesses also need to be open to new practices such as the crowdsourcing of ideas to drive innovation and value creation. Such practices will help businesses to attract talent and address the skills shortage and productivity issues that are hampering growth.
Expectations for future
We expect HDS to become a major player in vertically integrated technology solutions in public safety, healthcare, connected cars and energy. With our definite focus on content and data management, HDS has become a bigger and more engaging company. Our focus is aligned towards social innovation rather than pure-play storage and our growth strategy is intended towards diversifying our solutions portfolio while leveraging the unique strengths and synergies of Hitachi.
