Videos

Announcer: The following is an ESG on location video.

Mark: Welcome to Hitachi Vantara NEXT, here at the MGM in Las Vegas. We go to a lot of events, and very often you begin to think it might be the same old, same old. The first clue we had that there was something different going on here is actually some signs of humor on the posters as we walked to the convention center. Hitachi and humor is not a combination you'd usually imagine. Look at these potential combinations of words they thought of for the event. So this gave me the idea to introduce this video report by talking about some other important combinations.

First, and most significant, we have the combination of two organizations going on. Hitachi Vantara as was is now much bigger, including Hitachi Consulting. Clearly some challenges with drawing together different parts of the Hitachi organization, but great potential benefit for customers.

It talks about inspiring the Next, but as well as being inspirational, it needs to ensure that its products are aspirational. And that is a more sort of mojo-driven marketing effort to really get to the nitty gritty of what its products and its solutions can offer its clients and prospects.

And then thirdly, in terms of combination, is the double bottom line that Hitachi often talks about, the idea of not just delivering profit, but delivering social goodness. That's been part of the DNA of this organization for more than a century. As other organizations begin to embrace more of that expectation to do good as well as just to make good products, it's gonna be interesting to see if Hitachi and Vantara can make that something that is compelling to its user base, because it's so built in to the company.

Scott: At Hitachi NEXT this week, we've seen an impressive number of innovations, around data storage, around the cloud, around data ops, IT ops, and even the edge. We should probably start at storage. Right, so with the newly announced VSP 5000, it's touted as a massive storage array, with some amazing hero numbers. We talk about 21 million IOPS, 69 petabytes, but what's really interesting is as you look under the covers and understand the actual architecture, there's so much more to this array. So, it has embedded intelligence. It looks at, for predictive analytics, it better understands what's going on for predictive and proactive issue resolution, as well as how to optimize the system. It also has this incredibly agile scale-out architecture. So this thing is designed to where when new technologies come in, they can plug and play in a very mix-and-match and non-disruptive fashion. So essentially, you know, it's touted as an array, but it's really this ever-persistent, ever-evolving storage platform. So there's so much opportunity here.

And when you combine that with some of the other innovations that Hitachi is delivering, I mean, we see around the cloud, they're doing new things with this REAN acquisition that they just pulled in. They're doing things around automation and intelligence with IT ops, and then with data ops, with their Lumada platform. So many opportunities. Hitachi is really at a place where they can change what is possible with data. But the question that Hitachi has to answer moving forward is not about technology. It's really never been about technology with Hitachi. It's can they pull all these pieces together as part of a cohesive story to really help enable their customers transform for the better, to leverage their data to do more than what was possible before.

Mike: The big emphasis at this event was around data ops, empowering organizations as a whole, across all personas, to embrace data. But to do that, you need trust in the data. You need to apply intelligent governance. You need software and services and an end-to-end platform. One of the big takeaways is around Lumada, and the evolution of the brand to incorporate more of the Hitachi story as a whole. I think this is gonna really help Hitachi land across organizations, to satisfy that end-to-end platform requirement that organizations want. They want to embrace data, and they don't want to have to sacrifice a specific service. They don't wanna have to worry about only getting performance and lacking governance or vice versa. So a lot of the announcements were about enabling organizations, enabling businesses to embrace this platform, that will really empower all personas to complete their jobs better, to better collaborate, to deliver business value the right way, based on their requirements, their use case, their line of business. So I'm looking forward to seeing how that evolution continues throughout the next couple years.

Mark: The good and the bad from this event is essentially the same thing, which is there's a lot happening, both in terms of Vantara's organization, and also in terms of the extremely healthy and extremely compelling new products and solutions that it's added to its portfolio.

But I started this commentary by talking about combinations, and there's one other combination that I think is fascinating, and is really the greatest opportunity and determining factor of the success of this organization. That's the combination, the integration, if you like, not just of IT within itself, but of IT with society, IT as a component of society and doing good.

And if that can happen, then the outlook here is very bright.