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Company Brief
Hitachi Vantara

by Faulkner Staff

Copyright 2022 Faulkner Information Services. All Rights Reserved.

Docid: 00017965

Publication Date: 2208

Report Type: VENDOR

Preview

Hitachi Vantara was formed in 2017, combining Hitachi Data Systems, Pentaho, and Hitachi Insight Group into one
unified subsidiary under parent company Hitachi. The organization promotes its information technologies,
most notably intelligent data platforms, infrastructure systems, and digital expertise that supports more than 80
percent of the Fortune 100. This brief takes a look at the history of Hitachi Vantara, its executive team, its main
products and services, and recent news.

Report Contents:

• Fast Facts
• History
• Key Executives
• Major Products
• Major Competitors
• Recent Activity

Fast Facts

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Name: Hitachi Vantara Corp 
Headquarters
2535 Augustine Drive
Santa Clara, CA 95054
Phone: (678) 403-3035
(800) 227-1930
Fax: (408) 727-8036
Web: https://www.hitachivantara.com/
Founded: 1989 (originally as Hitachi Data Systems)
Service Areas:
Enterprise, Service Provider, Data Center

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History

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Hitachi Vantara is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. and is
headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company was formed in September 2017
by blending the operations of
several Hitachi, Ltd. subsidiaries – including Pentaho, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS),
and Hitachi Insight Group – into one new, unified organization. The goal was to
consolidate these companies’
operations and use their disparate assets in a more integrated manner to promote their data-driven solutions to commercial and industrial organizations.
This move toward integrating products and services has continued to be defining
philosophy driving the company’s acquisition strategy.

The original HDS was founded in 1989 when Hitachi and Electronic Data Systems
(EDS) acquired
National Advanced Systems, a company that marketed, sold, and serviced
IBM-compatible mainframes built by Hitachi, from National Semiconductor. In
1999, Hitachi acquired EDS’ stake in HDS, assuming full control.

The primary industries Hitachi Vantara services include converged systems,
big data and analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), storage, and data protection.
In addition, the vendor offers industry-specific solutions and counts Infosys,
Loma Linda University Health Care, Telefonica, Nasdaq, Teradata, and the 9/11
Memorial & Museum among its customers.

Key Executives

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Many of the executives from HDS have taken leadership roles at the newly
formed Hitachi Vantara, including Brian Householder who previously was COO and
President. The following corporate team leads Hitachi Vantara Systems.

CEO: Gajen Kandiah

President, Digital Infrastructure Business Unit: Mark Ablett

President, Digital Solutions Business Unit: Roger Lvin

President, Hitachi IT Products Division: Akinobu Shimada

Chief Digital Solutions Officer: Frank Antonysamy

Chief Product Officer: Radhika Krishnan

Chief Strategy Officer: Hiroyuki Kumazaki

General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer: Chris Leslie

Head of Marketing: John Magee

Chief Financial Officer: Inigo Mazquiaran

Chief Human Resources Officer: Amee Desjourdy

Chief Transformation Officer: Santhosh Sreemushta

Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer: Claire Thomas

Chief Revenue Officer: Scott Worman

Major Products

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Hitachi Vantara offers information technologies to protect data and increase
storage asset utilization and efficiency. The vendor’s key product lines are
detailed in the table below.

Major Competitors

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Hitachi Vantara faces competition from various other vendors in the storage and
networking space. The most notable competitors are as follows:

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE): https://www.hpe.com/

• IBM: https://www.ibm.com/
• Dell Technologies: https://www.dell.com/
• NetApp: https://www.netapp.com/
• Pure Storage: https://www.purestorage.com
• Huawei: https://www.huawei.com/
• Infinidat: https://www.infinidat.com
• Fujitsu: https://www.fujitsu.com/

Recent Activity

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In July 2022, Hitachi Vantara appointed Amee Desjourdy to the position of Chief Human Resources Officer
(CHRO) for the organization. Desjourdy most recently served as Chief People Officer at Brightcove, Inc. where
she was responsible for leading their global HR organization as well as building and driving a business-focused,
data-driven HR strategy during a period of growth and rapid change. She also led the company’s employee-centric
COVID response efforts, established a strong Talent function focused on deepening manager and employee capability,
and launched a global career development framework. Prior to Brightcove, Desjourdy was the CHRO for Global Partners
LP for five years where she led a multi-channel effort to build culture, improve the employee experience, and
decrease employee attrition. She was also responsible for leading the successful integration of several acquired
companies and formalizing a strategic corporate social responsibility program.

Hitachi Vantara unveiled its new Hitachi Application Reliability Services, a portfolio of cloud
consulting and managed services in February 2022. Hitachi positions the offering as a new approach
for developing, managing, and automatic cloud workloads that will enhance coordination between
product engineering and operations teams and improve application reliability by more than 25
percent compared to traditional approaches. The service optimizes cloud workloads for resiliency,
performance, and cost by incorporating a Site Reliability Engineering focused strategy with application
modernization and automation services. Hitachi Vantara says the result is significant improvements in
application availability with up to 25 percent improvement in the time it takes to detect and recover
from faults, and 15 percent improvement in change failure rate.¹

In August 2021, Hitachi Vantara made generally available its next-generation Lumada DataOps suite that integrates
a series of data operations services. As part of the offering, the company included the Pentaho data integration
capability, expanded with new features designed to make it easier for business users to build data integration pipelines.
IDC analyst Stewart Bond told TechTarget that the new DataOps suite integrates some of the disparate systems
Hitachi Vantara has acquired into one platform, such as the Lumada Data Catalog, which is based on technology Hitachi
Vantara gained with the acquisition of Waterline Data in January 2020. “Integrating data engineering together with data
intelligence and control capabilities in a single platform so that DataOps teams do not need to do the integration
themselves should help in team productivity and quality of outcome,” Bond said. He also noted, “DataOps itself is still
an evolving discipline, which means there are, likely, future DataOps requirements that the platform does not support
today, simply because of the unknowns.”²

Hitachi Vantara announced the promotion of sales and go-to-market leader Mark Ablett to the role of President, Digital
Infrastructure Business Unit, in August 2021. The unit serves 80 percent of the Fortune 100 with data storage, hyperconverged
and converged infrastructure, data protection, IT management, and edge-to-cloud infrastructure services. Ablett joined
Hitachi Vantara as senior vice president and general manager of Asia Pacific in 2015. He assumed worldwide responsibility
for digital infrastructure go-to-market strategy in 2017 and was promoted to Chief Revenue Officer of the Digital
Infrastructure Business Unit in February 2020. Prior to joining Hitachi Vantara, Ablett held a number of leadership
positions at Juniper Networks. He will report to CEO Gajen Kandiah in his new role.

Hitachi Vantara acquired data management firm Io-Tahoe, a subsidiary of the UK energy company Centrica, in June 2021.
Founded in 2017, Io-Tahoe brings together data engineering, science, and analytics on an open, unified platform, enabling
data teams to collaborate and innovate faster. Its AI-driven data management software helps clients address data challenges
by driving data quality, data lineage, workflow approval, and governance and regulatory compliance to deliver required
business outcomes. These capabilities will be integrated with Hitachi Vantara’s Lumada DataOps Suite that provides integration,
catalog, and edge capabilities. The addition of Io-Tahoe is the latest in a series of investments by Hitachi, enhancing the
company’s ambition and strategy to be the leader in the digital transformation of critical social infrastructure sectors such
as energy, transportation, financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing.

References

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¹ "Hitachi Vantara Launches Application Reliability Centers to Boost the Resiliency, Performance, and
Compliance of Cloud Applications." CIO.com. February 22, 2022. 

² Sean Michael Kerner. "Hitachi Vantara Expands Lumada DataOps Suite." TechTarget. August 19, 2021.

 

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