Tag: HDS HCP

Hitachi and the coming IoT gold rush

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Data analytics, Distributed computing, Energy efficiency, Information economy, Market dynamics, Object storage, R&D measures, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp

img_7137Earlier this week I attended Hitachi Summit 2016 along with a number of other analysts and Hitachi executives where Hitachi discussed their current and ongoing focus on the IoT (Internet of Things) business.

We have discussed IoT before (see QoM1608: The coming IoT tsunami or not, Extremely low power transistors … new IoT applications). Analysts and companies predict  ~200B IoT devices by 2020 (my QoM prediction is 72.1B 0.7 probability). But in any case there’s a lot of IoT activity going to come online, very shortly. Hitachi is already active in IoT and if anything, wants it to grow, significantly.

Hitachi’s current IoT business

Hitachi is uniquely positioned to take on the IoT business over the coming decades, having a number of current businesses in industrial processes, transportation, energy production, water management, etc. Over time, all these industries and more are becoming much more data driven and smarter as IoT rolls out.

Some metrics indicating the scale of Hitachi’s current IoT business, include:

  • Hitachi is #79 in the Fortune Global 500;
  • Hitachi’s generated $5.4B (FY15) in IoT revenue;
  • Hitachi IoT R&D investment is $2.3B (over 3 years);
  • Hitachi has 15K customers Worldwide and 1400+ partners; and
  • Hitachi spends ~$3B in R&D annually and has 119K patents

img_7142Hitachi has been in the OT (Operational [industrial] Technology) business for over a century now. Hitachi has also had a very successful and ongoing IT business (Hitachi Data Systems) for decades now.  Their main competitors in this IoT business are GE and Siemans but neither have the extensive history in IT that Hitachi has had. But both are working hard to catchup.

Hitachi Rail-as-a-Service

img_7152For one example of what Hitachi is doing in IoT, they have recently won a 27.5 year Rail-as-a-Service contract to upgrade, ticket, maintain and manage all new trains for UK Rail.  This entails upgrading all train rolling stock, provide upgraded rail signaling, traffic management systems, depot and station equipment and ticketing services for all of UK Rail.

img_7153The success and profitability of this Hitachi service offering hinges on their ability to provide more cost efficient rail transport. A key capability they plan to deliver is predictive maintenance.

Today, in UK and most other major rail systems, train high availability is often supplied by using spare rolling stock, that’s pre-positioned and available to call into service, when needed. With Hitachi’s new predictive maintenance capabilities, the plan is to reduce, if not totally eliminate the need for spare rolling stock inventory and keep the new trains running 7X24.

img_7145Hitachi said their new trains capture 48K data items and generate over ~25GB/train/day. All this data, will be fed into their new Hitachi Insight Group Lumada platform which includes Pentaho, HSDP (Hitachi Streaming Data Platform) and their Content Analytics to analyze train data and determine how best to keep the trains running. Behind all this analytical power will no doubt be HDS HCP object store used to keep track of all the train sensor data and other information, Hitachi UCP servers to process it all, and other Hitachi software and hardware to glue it all together.

The new trains and services will be rolled out over time, but there’s a pretty impressive time table. For instance, Hitachi will add 120 new high speed trains to UK Rail by 2018.  About the only thing that Hitachi is not directly responsible for in this Rail-as-a-Service offering, is the communications network for the trains.

Hitachi other IoT offerings

Hitachi is actively seeking other customers for their Rail-as-a-service IoT service offering. But it doesn’t stop there, they would like to offer smart-water-as-a-service, smart-city-as-a-service, digital-energy-as-a-service, etc.

There’s almost nothing that Hitachi currently supplies as industrial products that they wouldn’t consider offering in an X-as-a-service solution. With HDS Lumada Analytics, HCP and HDS storage systems, Hitachi UCP converged infrastructure, Hitachi industrial products, and Hitachi consulting services, together they are primed to take over the IoT-industrial products/services market.

Welcome to the new Hitachi IoT world.

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HDS Influencer Summit wrap up

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Decision making, Disk storage, Executive leadership, File Storage, Information economy, Object storage, Server virtualization, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage availability, storage economics, Strategic planning, System effectiveness

[Sorry for the length, it was a long day] There was an awful lot of information suppied today. The morning sessions were all open but most of the afternoon was under NDA.

Jack Domme,  HDS CEO started the morning off talking about the growth in HDS market share.  Another 20% y/y growth in revenue for HDS.  They seem to be hitting the right markets with the right products.  They have found a lot of success in emerging markets in Latin America, Africa and Asia.  As part of this thrust into emerging markets HDS is opening up a manufacturing facility in Brazil and a Sales/Solution center in Columbia.

Jack spent time outlining the infrastructure cloud to content cloud to information cloud transition that they believe is coming in the IT environment of the future.   In addition, there has been even greater alignment within Hitachi Ltd and consolidation of engineering teams to tackle new converged infrastructure needs.

Randy DeMont, EVP and GM Global Sales, Services and Support got up next and talked about their success with the channel. About 50% of their revenue now comes from indirect sources. They are focusing some of their efforts to try to attract global system integrators that are key purveyors to Global 500 companies and their business transformation efforts.

Randy talked at length about some of their recent service offerings including managed storage services. As customers begin to trust HDS with their storage they are start considering moving their whole data center to HDS. Randy said this was a $1B opportunity for HDS and the only thing holding them back is finding the right people with the skills necessary to provide this service.

Randy also mentioned that over the last 3-4 years HDS has gained 200-300 new clients a quarter, which is introducing a lot of new customers to HDS technology.

Brian Householder, EVP, WW Marketing, Business Development and Partners got up next and talked about how HDS has been delivering on their strategic vision for the last decade or so.    With HUS VM, HDS has moved storage virtualization down market, into a rack mounted 5U storage subsystem.

Brian mentioned that 70% of their customers are now storage virtualized (meaning that they have external storage managed by VSP, HUS VM or prior versions).  This is phenomenal seeing as how only a couple of years back this number was closer to 25%.  Later at lunch I probed as to what HDS thought was the reason for this rapid adoption, but the only explanation was the standard S-curve adoption rate for new technologies.

Brian talked about some big data applications where HDS and Hitachi Ltd, business units collaborate to provide business solutions. He mentioned the London Summer Olympics sensor analytics, medical imaging analytics, and heavy construction equipment analytics. Another example he mentioned was financial analysis firms usingsatellite images of retail parking lots to predict retail revenue growth or loss.  HDS’s big data strategy seems to be vertically focused building on the strength in Hitachi Ltd’s portfolio of technologies. This was the subject of a post-lunch discussion between John Webster of Evaluator group, myself and Brian.

Brian talked about their storage economics professional services engagement. HDS has done over 1200 storage economics engagements and  have written books on the topic as well as have iPad apps to support it.  In addition, Brian mentioned that in a late The Info Pro survey, HDS was rated number 1 in value for storage products.

Brian talked some about HDS strategic planning frameworks one of which was an approach to identify investments to maximize share of IT spend across various market segments.  Since 2003 when HDS was 80% hardware revenue company to today where they are over 50% Software and Services revenue they seem to have broaden their portfolio extensively.

John Mansfield, EVP Global Solutions Strategy and Development and Sean Moser, VP Software Platforms Product Management spoke next and talked about HCP and HNAS integration over time. It was just 13 months ago that HDS acquired BlueArc and today they have integrated BlueArc technology into HUS VM and HUS storage systems (it was already the guts of HNAS).

They also talked about the success HDS is having with HCP their content platform. One bank they are working with plans to have 80% of their data in an HCP object store.

In addition there was a lot of discussion on UCP Pro and UCP Select, HDS’s converged server, storage and networking systems for VMware environments. With UCP Pro the whole package is ordered as a single SKU. In contrast, with UCP Select partners can order different components and put it together themselves.  HDS had a demo of their UCP Pro orchestration software under VMware vSphere 5.1 vCenter that allowed VMware admins to completely provision, manage and monitor servers, storage and networking for their converged infrastructure.

They also talked about their new Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage which is an implementation of a Flash JBOD using MLC NAND but with extensive Hitachi/HDS intellectual property. Together with VSP microcode changes, the new flash JBOD provides great performance (1 Million IOPS) in a standard rack.  The technology was developed specifically by Hitachi for HDS storage systems.

Mike Walkey SVP Global Partners and Alliances got up next and talked about their vertical oriented channel strategy.  HDS is looking for channel partners perspective the questions that can expand their reach to new markets, providing services along with the equipment and that can make a difference to these markets.  They have been spending more time and money on vertical shows such as VMworld, SAPhire, etc. rather than horizontal storage shows (such as SNW). Mike mentioned key high level partnerships with Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, and SAP as helping to drive solutions into these markets.

Hicham Abhessamad, SVP, Global Services got up next and talked about the level of excellence available from HDS services.  He indicated that professional services grew by 34% y/y while managed services grew 114% y/y.  He related a McKinsey study that showed that IT budget priorities will change over the next couple of years away from pure infrastructure to more analytics and collaboration.  Hicham talked about a couple of large installations of HDS storage and what they are doing with it.

There were a few sessions of one on ones with HDS executives and couple of other speakers later in the day mainly on NDA topics.  That’s about all I took notes on.  I was losing steam toward the end of the day.

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