A piece of news from the back-end of last year, but worth memorialising here, in light of Hitachi Vantara’s early role in driving Industry 4.0 with its Lumada IoT platform, and its strategy and thought leadership to develop the co-creation story in digital transformation of industry. The firm’s parent, Hitachi, has spun-off part of its Vantara business as a new company called Hitachi Digital Services to focus on IoT, allied to data analytics and generative AI software, and seek to deliver closer integration of information and operational technology (IT and OT) in the Industry 4.0 game.
In fact, Hitachi Vantara is being split in two, effectively; a third division, selling IT products, is also being split from the parent company. The new Digital Services unit will take on the work of Hitachi Vantara’s old digital solutions unit, and focus on “cloud, data, [and] IoT technologies”, plus IT/OT integration services, a statement said. It will also seek to capitalise on new generative AI techniques. Energy, transportation, and industrial sectors are cited as primary targets. It will seek to deliver “company-wide… value to each industry”, said the statement.
The new Digital Services Business started operations last November. Its structural relationship with Hitachi Digital – created in North America in 2022 to sell ‘digital systems’ in the green energy, mobility, and industrial sectors, and link closely with Hitachi’s own energy and rail (Hitachi Energy and Hitachi Rail) companies – is not perfectly clear; the statement said the new unit will “drive Hitachi’s unique synergy creation under Hitachi Digital”. Hitachi Digital Services is headquartered in Santa Clara, in California in the US, and led by Roger Lvin, as chief executive.
The firm’s 2022 reorganisation followed its purchase, in March 2021, of Silicon Valley-based digital engineering services company GlobalLogic for $9.5 billion, billed at the time as “the largest acquisition by a Japanese electrical equipment company”. The firm was integrated into the old Vantara unit to “strengthen” its Lumada platform. At the same time as creating Hitachi Digital in North America, last November, it also announced it was creating GlobalLogic Japan to sell the “design-led digital engineering capabilities” of its new US quarry to customers in its home market.
Hitachi Digital Services will collaborate more closely with GlobalLogic in the US, it said – to “support enterprise transformation through automation of business processes and generative AI”.
Meanwhile, and somewhat confusingly, the latest reshuffle sees Hitachi Vantara “reorganised” in an “absorption-type split” into an “integrated Japan-US operation”, where the Japan-based (Ltd) business subsumes its old IT Platform Products Management Division and looks to strengthen its “storage and hybrid cloud-centric data infrastructure services portfolio”, and the a US-based (LLC) division takes up the slack in terms of sales and management of “data infrastructure products” for overseas markets, just minus the Lumada unit.
Hitachi Vantara (Ltd) in Japan is headquartered in Yokohama City, and led by Akinobu Shimada as president. Hitachi Vantara (LLC) in the US is based in Santa Clara, the same as its new digitalk services unit; it is led by Sheila Rohra, as chief executive. The Japanese Vantara unit will be operational from April. “We see the emergence of generative AI as a breakthrough with enormous impact,” explained Keiji Kojima, president and chief executive at Hitachi..
“Hitachi is continuously strengthening its business structure, including human resource development and policy development, with the aim of effectively utilising generative AI to unleash the potential of the company. Through this reorganisation, Hitachi will actively invest in the data infrastructure necessary for AI training and in OT and IT Integration, which Hitachi has domain knowledge, to achieve company-wide digital transformation through the use of generative AI.
“Going forward, Hitachi, together with GlobalLogic, Hitachi Digital Services, and [the] re-aligned Hitachi Vantara [business], will contribute to solving various issues faced by our customers and society by accumulating domain knowledge and data from a wide range of business fields, including energy and transportation, which are our strengths, in an enhanced and secure environment, while integrating digital assets such as generative AI.”
