Digital Transformation is the Key to success, SME Channels spoke to Anupam Nagar , Senior Director Hitachi Vantara to know his perspective and how Hitachi Vantara is actively reducing its Partners’ challenges by their strategy and Partner program.
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“Hitachi Vantara continues its transformation to help customers maximize the value of their data, the company has invested significantly in its partner business as a critical component for growth.”
Anupam Nagar,
Senior Director – Channels and Alliance,
Hitachi Vantara
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What is the portfolio of your offerings for digital transformation of your clients?
Digital Transformation (DX) is now a priority for businesses across APAC. At the heart of this transformation lies a critical enabler – data. Nobody knows data like Hitachi Vantara. We’ve helped the world’s largest and most complex organizations manage, govern, mobilize and analyze their data — giving them the foundation they need for digital transformation. At Hitachi Vantara, we empower our customers to realize their DataOps advantage through a unique combination of industry expertise and integrated systems that support the Data Stairway to Value (or SEAM). Hitachi Vantara offers a proven, end-to-end, DataOps methodology that lets businesses deliver better quality, superior management of data and reduced cycle time for analytics. DataOps is needed to understand the meaning of data as well as the technologies that are applied to the data so that data engineers can move, automate and transform the essential data that data consumers need. DataOps is a relatively new idea but it’s essential in today’s world where data is growing in volume and becoming more diverse, distributed and siloed than ever before. Businesses are looking to DataOps to efficiently get the right data, to the right place, at the right time in order to monetize their data and become a leader in today’s digital economy.
It has four components in the data stairway which is termed as store; enrich, activate and monetize; as the real value can be achieved with each step of the digital journey, but it all begins with data. These offerings enable our customers to:
STORE: Store, manage, and protect data at the lowest cost and at the right service levels across edge, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud solutions.
ENRICH: Enrich data with metadata classification and cataloging to provide context for intelligent data management and governance.
ACTIVATE: Discover, integrate, and orchestrate enterprise data assets and leverage analytics to generate actionable insights for every enterprise interaction and application.
MONETIZE: Deliver outcomes that capture the full economic value of all the data inside our customers’ enterprise and beyond.
In the end, it’s crucial our customers chose Hitachi Vantara—a partner who will co-innovate with them to successfully deliver on their vision. This means always starting at the business outcome they are looking to drive, pairing this with the industry expertise only we have, and implementing integrated systems that maximize the value of data at each step of SEAM.
What is your GTM and channel strategy?
At Hitachi Vantara we are extremely proud of how closely we are aligning our technology efforts with our key partners both on the technology side as well as the Go-To-Market side. We have a strong ecosystem of partners in India who can take our solutions, integrate them with their IPs and accelerate the rollout of IoT solutions locally and support the government’s vision of digitally empowered citizens. Hitachi-Vantara’s market focus is helping customers to improve their business outcomes with innovative tech solutions that will not only change the way companies operate, but also how the world works. The company’s mission is that its customers begin to “own” their data and learn how to
maximize their analytical capabilities to improve their business models. Hitachi-Vantara’s Internet of Things (IoT) solutions give customers the keys to unlocking the value of what’s happening within their enterprise.
We have highly structured academy-led training courses and certification levels called Hitachi Certified Professional Program. The Channel strategy is aimed at customers, to show the incremental value in the different stages of Hitachi Vantara’s business focus, and how those stages build on each other.
As Hitachi Vantara continues its transformation to help customers maximize the value of their data, the company has invested significantly in its partner business as a critical component for growth. We provide our partners with best-in-class certification program, which strengthens their professional capabilities to meet market needs and reach their business goals. We conduct periodical trainings for partners and regularly update them on our products and solutions through regular webinars. In addition, we organize annual partner events for our partners to interact with our executives face-to-face and discuss the latest industry trends and the ever-changing market needs. The last India CIO & Partner Summit was successfully held in Sri Lanka in February.
What are the technologies that channel partners should focus on to grow their business?
Our vision is to create a self-sustaining, value selling and profitable ecosystem of partners which forms the crux of our channel strategy in India. One of our key objectives is to bring about more clarity on partner roles by outlining clear expectations.
The increased storage demand from the Public Sector, Professional Services and BFSI drove the growth of the storage market in India. As part of their technology refresh and capacity expansion, modernization initiatives and investments on emerging technologies continuously drive the incremental growth.
How is Hitachi Vantara supporting the channel partners reducing their challenges?
By 2020, an estimated 50 billion physical objects will be consuming, generating and communicating data; thus, turning the world into a giant data center. “Internet of Things That Matter” are data-driven things, trends, challenges and opportunities that have the greatest potential to make a big impact on businesses, society and the world at large.
The digital transformation of businesses, advent of 3rd platform technologies and rapid digitization of services has led to significant increase in creation and consumption of data. In fact, the demand for storage solutions will continue to rise in the next 5 years.
In the foreseeable future, there are significant opportunities for our channel partners to develop a long-term business strategy that will enable them to primarily focus on storage solutions along with peripheral solutions required to support workloads of enterprises.
From a partner’s perspective, the key lies in getting the partners to add steps beyond that first, while another objective lies in getting them to understand that the different nature of IoT products places a much higher premium value than traditional business on collaboration.
Our strategy encompasses all channel facets where we have devised programs and policies for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), Master System Integrators, Large System Integrators, Value Added Resellers and Distributors. This has also enabled us to bring about more clarity on mapping the right solutions, catering to the right segments via the right channels. Another important factor that Hitachi Vantara would consider in its long-term channel strategy involves the greater partner ecosystem because it is fundamental to the success of the IoT market in the future.
Hitachi Vantara will continue to innovate and deliver core data services, data infrastructure and content delivered “as-a-Service”. We’re moving away from a “speeds and feeds” metric to focus on what really matters: business outcomes.
Our partner ecosystem is highly critical to our success. As we look to broaden our ecosystem expertise and deepen our cloud, analytics, and IoT services and offerings, we will continue to expand our solution-capable partner ecosystem to accelerate co-creation and innovation and to help our customers fully leverage their data to drive extraordinary outcomes.
What are the recent initiatives taken by Hitachi Vantara’s channel partner program?
One of our unique propositions is the adoption of value co-creation approach with our partners with a single objective of helping our customers in their journey of Digital Transformation.
We are working on a reverse engineering model where we will be exploring to do more with less, thereby giving enough market opportunities to our partners to address and grow their business.
The new program is based on how to drive solutions, not products. Everything that has been built now is about the solution and the joint business planning process that focuses on core initiatives, solutions, route to market and where our partners want to go.
The new Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure build on our global Cisco partnership, paving the way for expanding our collaboration into new areas and the new Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) that combines the companies’ technologies including Hitachi’s storage and Cisco’s compute and networking.
Introduced in September 2018, Hitachi VSP PRO semi-customizable configurations are a prime example of how the company is delivering on its promises to simplify and accelerate sales cycles for partners. Created expressly for the partner community, Hitachi VSP PRO solutions allow partners to quickly and easily quote small, medium, large and extra-large systems with an automated, self-service sales model that reduces the process from several hours to a matter of minutes.
The key differentiator would be Hitachi Vantara’s innovative models of selling to customers via these focused partners. We will continue to collaborate with our partners to penetrate newer markets and increase our market share.
India is a huge market, what are the challenges Hitachi Vantara faces and do you have any particular sector in mind which is a pain point for you?
Across every industry, analytics and business intelligence are hot topics that promise greater insight, more efficiency, and a more competitive organization. And analytics can truly deliver on those promises, despite the myriad challenges that many organizations face in getting that value.
One of the most pervasive challenges today is siloed data. Data coming from assets may be used only at the edge, while business applications often have their own separate infrastructure, databases, and sets of information. Getting a complete picture of information across the organization is difficult—often impossible. Without the ability to bring data from disparate systems together in a way that enables fast, smart decision making, business outcomes are poor, and costs are high.
Not only are data silos a common problem, but data generation itself can be a challenge, too. Many organizations have not been ready to take advantage of analytics capabilities, and don’t generate enough data to derive insights from. Other organizations may generate large volumes of data in the hope that they can derive some business value from it but lack the filtering capabilities to make sense of data and put the right information in the hands of people who need it.
Good predictive abilities require good data gathering and filtering processes. By bringing together the right data from across the organization, whether it lives at the edge or in the data centre, the results can be better business outcomes. The analytics capabilities of Lumada address these challenges and deliver fast time-to-value, so that your outcomes are better, faster.
Are there any specific verticals that are posing the most problems and how are you dealing with those problems?
Hitachi Vantara across the cloud ecosystem, continues to expand the number of pre-certified cloud applications to streamline the cloud purchasing process and help enterprises improve efficiency and deployment cycles. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform and Hitachi Content Platform helps in accelerating your communications digital transformation, reducing costs and deploying new telecom services quickly with a simplified, scalable cloud-enabled converged solution.
Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform accelerates delivery of applications with flash performance, penalty-free compression and faster response times. It speeds workloads, applications and resolve complex IT business challenges with robust, automated data management and protection. The fully managed, pre-engineered storage solutions with consumption-based pricing, guaranteed service levels with end-to-end support for all data types with object, block and file storage helps in accelerating deployment time, and time to desired service levels with budget savings from reducing unused capacity and assurance of achieving desired service levels.
Financial services organizations need to transform their data into actionable information to reduce costs, manage risk, meet regulatory compliance and enhance customer, Hitachi Vantara helps in providing solutions on the same. Lumada Applications for Industrial IoT helps with sensor data, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, by gaining end-to-end operational visibility and predictive quality to overcome process inefficiencies and information silos.
Cities and organizations thrive through shared business, operational, and security intelligence that helps them deliver better services, run more efficiently and be safer places to live and work. It takes a Community to Build a Smart City by unleashing the power of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, analytics and video intelligence to fuel innovation and solving local challenges.
Hitachi data solutions for healthcare and life sciences can make it happen by turning massive data stores, types, and accessibility into opportunities to improve lives and transform your organization. The innovative, proven, Hitachi data services portfolio captures, stores, manages and processes siloed sources of information by providing personalized customer experiences and optimized merchandiseplanning transform consumer engagement from static to strategic. Retail industry can shift to a scalable, unified data foundation for real-time retail insight that gives customers what they want and the competitors a run for their money.
The right connected technology and expertise empowers local, state and national governments to improve community safety and sustainability through smarter public services. City governments and communities unite to drive new urban innovations through the first combined data marketplace platform. Hitachi Vantara provides holistic approaches for Complex Problems by streamlining government operations, reducing costs, and creating transparency. Lastly, the media applications and workflows demand fast, automated and collaborative post-production solutions, Hitachi Vantara modernize your media workflow with a single, unified plug-and-play architecture. Data services is activated for better content management, governance and delivery on a global scale which helps in achieving greater insight to your data to improve decision-making agility in a dynamic environment.
What is the potential business impact for channel partners by partnering with Hitachi Vantara?
No company on the planet has the combination of IT and OT expertise, along with the existing technology assets and domain expertise as Hitachi. With more than 119,00 patents, an annual R&D budget of $2.9 billion and more than 2,700 employees dedicated to innovation, our solutions provide superior data management, data governance, data mobility, data analytics and IoT technologies.
Hitachi Vantara is a data company. We remain committed to innovating in our infrastructure portfolio to help our customers manage their data while we chart a path into the world of analytics and IoT to maximize data residing at the edge. The result is a focus on business outcomes cantered our even Systems Integration and Managed Services providers. We call them our Global Systems Integrator (GSI) partners. Together with our GSI partners, we enable our customers to derive the business and technology value needed to compete in today’s market by leveraging unique solutions to meet your biggest challenges.
Our GSI partners are one of the strongest pillars for Hitachi Vantara. We are ready to support them with the latest technologies such as AI, ML and Data Analytics.
Customers of our GSI partners are mostly Fortune500 companies and us stroke relationships based on our technology stack which we have offered to GSI partner.
