Oh, hey, look – it's the hardware storing all your medical records

Imagine if GE owned EMC – that's Hitachi today

Hitachi has whipped out a data-center outage tool, a health data storage product, and an analytics center of excellence – and put them under a social innovation umbrella. What gives?

Hitachi and HDS is turning itself into a kind of amalgam of GE (General Electric) and EMC. The three new products are:

• Hitachi Live Insight for IT Operations.
• Updated Hitachi Clinical Repository for Connected Health.
• Hitachi Live Insight Center of Excellence.

Live Insight for IT Ops is a data-center outage investigation tool, somewhat equivalent to Splunk. It takes in data from IT gear, applications, power units, and temperature sensors, to detect outages, and identify their root cause. It is cloud-based, and Hitachi classes it as a machine-to-machine app.

HDS says it has a five-step service to accelerate analytics involving data acquisition, mapping and interpretation, predictive modeling, and data processing and retrieval tools, such as Hadoop and NoSQL.

Connected health

Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) for Connected Health has been boosted with secure mobile access. It is based on the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) which had an Internet of Things-focussed update in January.

HCR stores health-related data in HCP and so, in principle, makes patient records and health information stored in it sharable and discoverable across multiple caregivers. If permitted, medics can log into this gear to get faster access to patient diagnoses, treatment plans, prescriptions, and so on.

It provides health professionals with analytics and – here HDS goes into marketing vagueness – "proven delivery methods that let them adapt better to societal changes and increase strategic decision-making to optimize patient care." Does this mean that it can now send you a text message to say your cancer is responding to treatment?

Live Insight Centre of Excellence (LICE – not an acronym HDS would treasure) is a center offering, HDS says, to help customers test, customize, and deploy analytics systems, apps, platforms and integrated bundles of Hitachi and third-party offerings.

Connecting analytics to everything

Hitachi aims to extend its footprint in the IoT, machine-to-machine, and big data analytics markets this year, with plans for new products and services for connected cars and connected energy. They will use products and technologies sourced from across Hitachi group companies.

It says its "social innovation roadmap is now accelerating, buoyed by recent strategic software acquisitions that are providing the fundamental building blocks to deliver a smart analytics foundation."

El Reg offers the thought that this overall Hitachi social innovation marketing pitch fails to resonate with IT pros.

For example, it says of the announcements above that they "make societies safer, smarter and healthier." You can see the big picture idea here but, in our IT corral it can look far removed from everyday concerns, like getting data center outages dealt with. Including Live Insight for IT operations under a social innovation umbrella could be a marketing stretch too far. On the other hand it is, for sure, distinctive. ®