With Over $5B in Combined Global Revenue, 33 IoT Solutions In-Market, Global Operations and Collaborations with AT&T, Eurotech, Intel, Microsoft, PTC and SAP, Hitachi Sets Its Sights on Leadership in the Industrial and Enterprise IoT Markets
Hitachi has announced the formation of Hitachi Insight Group. Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, the new group will drive Hitachi’s unified Internet of Things (IoT) business and go-to-market (GTM) strategy worldwide. With USD$5.4 billion in IoT solutions and services revenue generated in 2015 and 33 solutions in-market today, Hitachi offers one of the broadest IoT solutions portfolios in the industry. By uniting its digital and IoT solutions and services businesses, Hitachi is positioning itself to lead in this fast-growing market. The newly formed Hitachi Insight Group will be the ‘tip of the spear’ in Hitachi’s quest to capture market share in what IDC projects to be a $1.46 trillion market opportunity by 2020.1
IoT is propelling a rapid convergence of our physical and digital worlds, creating unprecedented opportunities and challenges for businesses, cities, governments and industries. Hitachi is a pioneer in the creation and application of sensors to provide connected intelligence and support early IoT use cases in industrial markets, such as predictive maintenance and optimized factory. The company’s rich 106-year industrial heritage and extensive proficiencies in operational technology (OT), combined with its more than 50 years experience in developing advanced information technologies (IT), make it uniquely capable of helping customers to extract actionable insights from IoT and fully capitalize on the benefits of digitalization. Few companies possess Hitachi’s breadth of expertise or deep understanding of the IoT value chain, which are essential to build and deploy digital solutions at scale.
“The greatest opportunity for IoT lies in the enterprise, industrial and public sector markets, which stand to benefit significantly from digital transformation. Although the market is still nascent, digitalization is already disrupting traditional product-based business models, driving demand for solutions and an everything-as-a-service approach,” said Vernon Turner, senior vice president, enterprise systems and IoT research fellow at IDC. “Few companies possess the expertise and breadth of resources required to deliver IoT solutions and services, and drive real business value at scale. With today’s announcements, Hitachi is making good progress toward positioning itself to be one of the few likely IoT powerhouses as the market shakes out.”
Hitachi’s IoT portfolio includes solutions and services for public safety and smart cities, renewable and sustainable energy, intelligent transportation, precision agriculture and manufacturing, water treatment and urban development, construction, mining and more. These digital solutions deliver connected intelligence and drive actionable insights to support better business decision-making and tangible real world outcomes, like increased productivity and safety, streamlined business processes, lower cost of operations, reduced carbon footprint, and improved quality of life.
To enhance its existing portfolio and support the development of new solutions and services, the company has created Lumada, Hitachi’s IoT core platform. Lumada’s open, adaptable software architecture is designed to accelerate the development of IoT solutions, while providing flexible support for customization and co-creation with Hitachi’s customers and partners.
The formation of Hitachi Insight Group is part of Hitachi’s corporate strategy and initiative to move its business toward a market-in approach. Led by Keiji Kojima, Ph.D., who also holds concurrent positions as senior vice president and executive officer at Hitachi Ltd, the group will drive research and development and GTM strategies for Hitachi’s IoT-optimized solutions and services, in four key market segments: Smart City, Smart Energy, Smart Healthcare and Smart Industry. Hitachi’s global IoT-focused team of more than 16,000 employees from Hitachi Insight Group and various divisions across Hitachi Ltd. and its Group companies, including Hitachi Data Systems and Hitachi Consulting among others, will collaborate to accelerate delivery of solutions.
“Through the formation of Hitachi Insight Group and the Lumada IoT core platform we will provide Hitachi’s customers and partners with the fastest and simplest path to develop and deploy comprehensive digital solutions at scale,” Keiji Kojima commented. “It is a profound honor to lead this elite team in accelerating Hitachi’s global IoT business through the creation of digital solutions and services.”
Hitachi Insight Group’s leadership team includes veteran executives Kevin Eggleston, general manager for the Americas, and Patrik Sjostedt, general manager for EMEA. The group will receive strategic direction and support from Hitachi Ltd. regional leaders Jack Domme, chief executive of the Americas; Klaus Dieter Rennert, chief executive for EMEA; Ichiro Iino, chief executive for Asia-Pacific; and Kenichi Kokubo, chief executive for China. Hitachi said it plans to establish regional operations for Hitachi Insight Group in APAC later this year.
Hitachi Insight Group has also introduced Lumada, an IoT core platform. Integrating proven commercial technologies from across Hitachi’s portfolio, Lumada is a comprehensive, enterprise-grade IoT core platform with an open and adaptable architecture that simplifies IoT solution creation and customization. It incorporates expansive expertise in operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT), blending powerful and proven data orchestration, streaming analytics, content intelligence, simulation models, and other Hitachi software technologies. Lumada accelerates synthesizing of actionable insights, delivering faster time to value and supporting better decisions that lead to real world outcomes, like increased productivity and safety, streamlined processes, reduced operational costs and carbon footprint, or improved quality of life. The platform will serve as the core foundation on which all of Hitachi’s IoT solutions are built and will enable the creation of IoT business ecosystems.
Digital transformation is a key initiative for many public and private sector organizations looking to optimize processes, implement broader efficiencies and improve interactions with their customers and constituents. As such, the application of IoT solutions that can deliver valuable insight to support transformation is rapidly becoming a strategic imperative in almost every industry and market sector. However, building IoT solutions that provide real value can be difficult – especially without the right underlying architecture or the deep understanding to properly simulate and digitalize operational entities and processes. IoT platforms are necessary, but often introduce new layers of complexity and rigidity to IoT solutions, making them difficult to modify and incapable of holistically supporting all the elements of digital business and market ecosystems at scale.
Lumada was specifically designed to address the challenges associated with IoT solution creation leveraging Hitachi’s rich OT and IT expertise and technologies. Its uniquely open and adaptable architecture makes it broadly applicable for a wider array of industries and use cases, providing an extensible, flexible platform from which Hitachi and its customers and partners can easily tailor solutions or co-create.
“IoT platforms unquestionably have an important role to play in the development and deployment of IoT solutions. However, they can introduce new layers of complexities, which can hinder the implementation and benefits of the solutions themselves,” said Christian Renaud, research director, IoT, at 451 Research. “While it is still very early days in the IoT platform market, the landscape is crowded, making it difficult for new vendors to differentiate themselves. Hitachi’s extensive expertise in OT and IT gives them a unique understanding of the fundamental requirements to build and deploy IoT solutions at scale. This allows Hitachi to help customers get actionable business insight that translates into real business value, faster.”
