After establishing itself in the storage and virtualization space, the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is now leveraging emerging opportunities in the Internet of Things (IoT) by launching a social innovation platform.
In an exclusive interaction Yogesh Sawant, Director, Partner Sales and Field Alliance Organization, HDS India, talked about how the company is preparing its brigade of partners to tap the emerging opportunities in storage solutions.
Excerpts from the interview…
As the company makes its way into being an end-to-end solutions player, what do you think is shaping HDS offerings and channel business?
Yogesh Sawant Hitachi TrueNorth Partner Program empowers our partners to grow their business, market reach and profitability through the delivery of advanced business data solutions that embrace next generation technology and services. Most part of my end-customer sales experience has been in working with the partner ecosystem. Needless to mention this has been instrumental in tweaking HDS India Channels strategy. At HDS, we are closely aligning our technology efforts with our key partners both on the technology side as well as the Go-To-Market side. Hitachi Data Systems aims to be a 100% channel organization.
HDS has authorized service providers who offer services on behalf of the company. HDS offers them training to cope with the necessary skillsets to deliver services around HDS technologies. HDS adds value by creating opportunities in the Indian market with technology allied partners like VMware, Veritas, SAP, Microsoft, etc.
We have around 60 partners in India and are constantly looking for newer partnerships to handle newer markets. We also conduct regular training programs to enable our partner community to deliver better services to customers and are also investing in the form of scholarship programs, technology refresh courses and new products and solutions. We are also looking to roll out many new programs especially services specialization programs (SSPs).
CT: How bullish is HDS for itself and partners about opportunities in government’s ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ programs?
Yogesh SawantHitachi Data Systems believes in connecting business and society through technology. The data driven business and organizations can bring in positive outcomes in this changing world. The Digital India vision, E-Kranti services and 100 Smart Cities projects will bring in tons of structured and unstructured data from across various governmental departments. There is a need for timely and agile data analysis and management. Also, there is increased importance of efficient storage solutions to store, process and manage data in a meaningful manner and translate them into real-time benefits..
Hitachi Data Systems is known for its expertise in managing and storing data. Also, the unique perspective of HDS is that, it has built in many machines and connected devices that produce data and help maintain today’s businesses and people. Hitachi Data Systems has recently launched the social innovation platform to transform businesses for better decision making. Social Innovation is the unifying strategy across Hitachi’s businesses to deliver solutions for the Internet of Things and big data – solutions that enable healthier, safer and smarter societies. HDS is transforming itself from a data storage provider into an information solutions company – to become a leader in the market for Big Data and Internet of Things that matter, helping customers turn data into intelligence.
CT: Do you think Indian channels have the desired skillset and are doing enough to push IoT forward?
Yogesh Sawant: Today, there are billions of devices that can connect to the Internet and communicate with each other — and the Internet of Things is growing faster every day. As new devices produce more data, data intelligence solutions enable companies to quickly turn these machine-to-machine analytics into actionable insights that drive better decision-making and user experiences. This offers tremendous business potential for the channel community to harness. Skills can be garnered, services can be rendered. We see many partners seeking these solutions around which they can build the necessary services to offer and end-to-end solution to the customer.
CT: What is the road ahead for HDS next 1-2 years?
Yogesh Sawant: Hitachi Data Systems is transforming from a data storage provider into an information solutions company. We also aim to become a leader in the market for Big Data and Internet of Things, enabling customers to turn data into intelligence. Big data is not just IT but a business requirement and businesses must understand what IT can do to deliver the desired outcome. We are uniquely positioned to innovate with information for IoT through collaborations with Hitachi family of companies. We are focused on taking a major leap forward to Big Data analytics and Social Innovation through continuous innovation & acquisitions.
HDS’ Social Innovation initiative aims to address both business and society challenges including population growth and urbanization, aging public infrastructures and populations, rising healthcare costs and public safety concerns. To address these needs, HDS is leveraging its data infrastructure technologies and smart analytics software foundation to develop purpose-built solutions for a variety of markets. These solutions combine the IoT with operational technology, and IT infrastructure all in a unified, fully integrated stack.
CT: What have been the product enhancements this year, what are the niche areas HDS wants to grow and why?
Yogesh Sawant: HDS is focused on diversifying the product and solution portfolios to become more than ‘just a storage company’ and expanding the proficiency in advanced data analytics, Internet of Things and connected intelligence. HDS is uniquely positioned to help societies and businesses solve some of the world’s biggest problems – from public safety to sustainability, transportation and healthcare. HDS call this Social Innovation, or the “Internet of Things that Matter.”
Some of the social innovation platform are:
Hitachi Visualization for Public Safety:
Hitachi Live Insight for Telecom:
Hitachi Live Insight for IT Operations:
Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR):
Hitachi Live Insight Center of Excellence:
We are predominately focusing on BFSI, manufacturing, telecom, IT and ITeS sectors, where we help customers to leverage their data, engage with customers and work more efficiently while spending less. In the last 4 years, we have a strong focus on the government sector. HDS is directly contributing to government’s initiatives like Digital India, MyGov, etc. 15% of our revenue come from the government sector. We don’t reach out to the government directly, but through our partner and systems integrator network. We are looking at a unique set of partners for the government sector based on their expertise.
CT:What is your strategy to tap the x86 server markets?
Yogesh Sawant:Hitachi Data Systems has recently expanded the G- Series and has opened up a path to a single converged enterprise storage array platform. The Virtual storage platform family expansion i.e. VSP G200, G400, G600, G800 are no application-specific integrated circuit for a particular purpose but relies only on x86 servers. The unified component available in the G- line series has the ability for NAS (Network attached storage) function. It will have an FPGA for hardware acceleration, and it will feature HNAS running inside a virtual machine – a very light, container under HDS’ ownership and supervision.
CT: What are the key trends in the enterprise mobility and digital, how are you building your partners for the same?
Yogesh Sawant:You want easy access to your files anywhere, on any device. Not just the files from your laptop, but those in your corporate file shares. IT wants to offer these services, but has concerns around security, compliance and protection when this data leaves their control for consumer cloud services.
Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere (HCP Anywhere) is a fully integrated, secure cloud solution for enterprise mobility, including mobile access to NAS data, file synchronization and sharing as well as configuration and management of Hitachi Data Ingestor file server gateways. HCP Anywhere uses Hitachi Content Platform, the most secure, efficient, scalable and highest-density hybrid cloud storage platform object store, to store, protect, secure and manage data behind the scenes.
We have various enablement courses to ensure that our partners are well versed with the nuances of such technologies. We encourage our partners resources to undertake these training programs and get the necessary certifications. We link these certifications to financial incentives to keep the motivation among the partner field force at an all-time high.