Hitachi Data Systems vice president and general manager A/NZ, Nathan McGregor
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) wants its partners to move beyond offering traditional enterprise IT deployments and move up the solution stack.
HDS is no longer interested in just selling storage, virtualisation and converged platforms. As part of its parent, Hitachi, it has access trains, elevators, video cameras, facial recognition technologies and license plate detectors, and is aiming for its partners to build businesses based on the entire Hitachi stack.
According to Hitachi Data Systems vice president and general manager A/NZ, Nathan McGregor, the key is Big Data and analytics leveraged from the HDS platform.
“We want to be a part of that value chain where customers are using more sophistication to manage and store their data and use it,” he said.
“Of course, that ultimately underpins a lot of our traditional infrastructure which is a great place to be.
“It is the bit at the top that we call social innovation, but essentially what it is, is Information technology and operational technology [IT/OT] working together."
Our strategy on analytics is the IoT play, it’s all that sensor data through to analytics.
“HDS plays at that infrastructure level but when we think about the one Hitachi, it is that full stack. We have cameras with facial recognition capabilities, we have licence plate detectors that bring in the public safety aspect with software sitting on the analytics side called visualisation, it brings all of those together on mass for a law enforcement capability on a public community system.
“This is the direction that we are taking our business, it’s IT/OT because Hitachi makes mining trucks that have a self driving capability, that’s an OT capability that integrates very nicely into IT.
“Partners need to all play at this angle, not one partner can we go to and say, why don’t you do all of this.”
McGregor explained that HDS doesn’t just want resellers, service providers and systems integrators to partner with it, the company is actively encouraging partners to collaborate with each other so that each can bring their own speciality to the table to solve customer problems.
“Can I promise partners will double revenue tomorrow by going down this path? No, but I can tell you that is the direction we are heading,” he said.
HDS vice president integrated solutions GTM, Richard Grabinger, added that the relevance and differentiation the company can provide because of that coverage is unique in the market.
“Nobody else has that package,” he said.
“There is a big transformation going on in the market anyway, and where these things are leading to is special assets and that what we call the solution capable partners bring to the game.
“This offers Nathan and his team opportunities they did not have in the past. It is all integrated and that is why it is a very interesting play for the partners and a very interesting play for us.”
Grabinger was quick to point out that this will be a step by step approach.
“It will be very focussed and in very small steps,” he said.
“Hitachi has 420 divisions, it’s a big company. What we are trying to do to support the A/NZ channel from a corporate base is driving prioritisation and say, these are the first two we are going with.”
“We are trying to do that for our local people, so that they can then go to the market and have a better reach through that we can’t have. We have to give Nathan and his team the framework to be successful,” he added.
Chris Player travelled to Connect 2015 as a guest of Hitachi Data Systems.
