PRIMED FOR THE NEW PARADIGM

As economies reopen and businesses get to test new strategies, Hitachi Vantara’s Joe Ong offers insights into equipping the enterprise for the next normal.

Hitachi Vantara provides data storage solutions for businesses, as well as hardware, software, data analytics, and consultation services. The company helps maximize the value of a company’s data by storing them in a way that they can be analyzed to generate actionable insights, says Joe Ong, Vice President and General Manager, ASEAN. Such analyses can lead to the discovery of new revenue streams, data monetization, or increasing customer loyalty.

Part of the company’s offering is the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), a foundational data platform that enables digital transformation and future DataOps services. It works with the Hitachi Content Intelligence (HCI) platform to produce custom metadata storage and query capabilities. HCP and HCI integrate with other technologies, such as Pentaho, to match and analyze customers’ data with agility and visibility across the edge, core, and the public cloud.

“My division sells the hardware for data storage infrastructure. We enable medium-size enterprises in ASEAN to operate with the benefits of enterprise-grade data storage infrastructure, bringing about digital transformation in their organizations so that they can easily scale,” Joe says.

Today, Hitachi Vantara products work across numerous verticals, including financial, telecommunications, public safety, manufacturing, and energy.

Robust, Stable Set Up

Hitachi Vantara’s set up is very robust, claims Joe. “We prepped years ago to work from anywhere. Our staff are well-drilled with contingency plans, so when the pandemic hit, we were more than able to weather this period and to conduct business virtually.”

For instance, during the circuit breaker, Hitachi Vantara launched an entire suite of products, VSP E990, a.k.a. Jamaica, which drastically lowers data storage costs for medium-size enterprises, and helps them to simplify data infrastructure management.

“It is a product range that is most apt for the Southeast Asian market. We launched it with a virtual press briefing, which several media from across the region were able to attend. It received excellent news coverage of the launch, informing our stakeholders when we were not able to do so in person.”

Investing in Critical Infra

Joe asserts that the company has not been adversely affected by the pandemic, although they have experienced delays or extensions, in customer decision making on pipeline projects.

“As you can imagine, the pandemic has accelerated the requirement for companies to invest in critical infrastructure for mission-critical requirements,” says Joe.

“Many mid-sized companies were not well prepared for the pandemic as their infrastructure was built on traditional platforms that did not enable remote access or to process data remotely,” Joe observes.

The sudden demand to work from home required employees to access data from anywhere, and on any device, is a security risk to the companies’ most valuable asset – their data. “As employees now conduct most of their work online, it has given companies a chance to collect data for analysis and business growth, yet data governance remains a challenge due to elements like data quality, data alignment, data clarity and building a data-centric culture, among others. “We can help businesses to address these issues with our hardware, especially with data recovery in the event of data loss,” he says.

Stable, Agile Digital Core

Joe cites that while some companies, like IDC, forecast that IT spending in the Asia Pacific will drop by 5.8 per cent to 1.2 per cent due to the pandemic. The forecast does not factor increased demand from essential services businesses that require 100 per cent business continuity and data availability. “These businesses are now making investments in mission-critical infrastructure. So how we price has also become important over this period.

“For instance, our launch of the VSP E990 series was timely as it is priced for SMEs and offers best-in-class enterprise-class performance at lowest $GB/IOPs and with 100 per cent data availability. To purchase the hardware, we now provide our customers with a flexible consumption model, the ‘Everflex’ program. The program helps them to prioritize OPEX over CAPEX spending, which uniquely lets our customers pay as they use and scale, or save as they scale down.”

Both service providers and enterprises are struggling to deploy their resources to cope with the surge in demand on infrastructure, explains Joe. “We help businesses create a stable and agile digital core, coupled with intelligent operations to allocate their resources and to cope with surge demands. Our systems also help companies to transcend geographical boundaries and offer availability despite restrictions to data centers.”

The pandemic has clearly proven two points: some cloud vendors have struggled with the sudden surge in demand for cloud services or data requirements, Joe elaborates. “Some private firms are challenged with limited resources to address this sudden surge in capacity or resources for their data infrastructures. In both instances, Hitachi helps address the issues by seamlessly integrating with major cloud service providers, with support for both traditional workloads and modern container platforms.”

Entering A New Paradigm

Digital transformation for organizations has reached its tipping point, Joe surmises. “It is more imperative than ever that companies monetize their data to discover new revenue streams. Digital transformation will help businesses to cope with the new paradigm that we are entering.

“Our strategic DataOps advantage: Edge-to-cloud infrastructure and intelligent, data-driven solutions. The way we classify and catalog data means that when the data is analyzed and it generates action-oriented insights to monetize and deliver business-driven outcomes.”

This means that organizations need to remove their data from silos, Joe suggests. “Employees hold the key to turning data into outcomes—at both business and societal levels.”

Joe claims they hear far less about the ‘how’, specifically, ‘How can a company do that when data has become more diverse, distributed, and dense than ever? “Our job is to help managers get the right piece of data to the right employee at the right time while ensuring it remains secure by utilizing DataOps.”

By putting DataOps into the hands of managers, Hitachi Vantara aims to make ‘what if’ scenarios a thing of the past, Joe says. “By empowering employees with the right data at the right time, they can make decisions that can be monetized.

“Today, we are at the early stages of the DataOps journey — Gartner estimates the current adoption rate of DataOps at less than one per cent of the addressable market. A relatively new methodology, DataOps is enterprise data management for the AI era, centered around automating much of these processes that take up a data scientist’s time.”

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