This article is more than 1 year old

Hitachi Data Systems is no more! Arise the new 'Hitachi Vantara'

HDS, Pentaho and Hitachi Insight Group join forces, promise data-driven IoT fun

Hitachi Data Systems is no more: the venerable storage vendor has been subsumed into a new outfit called “Hitachi Vantara” that says it “helps data-driven leaders find and use the value in their data to innovate intelligently and reach outcomes that matter for business and society.”

The new organisation remains a Hitachi subsidiary, and mashes together HDS, the IoT-focussed Hitachi Insight Group, and analytics outfit Pentaho into “a single integrated business”.

Vantara's arrival isn't a complete surprise, as HDS has spent the last few years talking up its ability to work with other members of the Hitachi group to do “social innovations” like build smart cities. That vision imagined HDS as supplying storage and compute, while Pentaho did analytics of data tended by the Insight Group's IoT wares.

Vantara formalises that arrangement and extends it.

“The idea here and the whole reason this whole thing came together was to span the Hitachi group companies and work more cohesively,” Christian Tate, Vantara's veep of corporate development, told The Register. Tate added that while Vantara starts with the assets of its three member companies, it has a mission to find more useful assets wherever they can be found within Hitachi and also to spruik its own wares so that they land in the group's many other products.

That cross-pollination is expected to be fruitful because Vantara thinks the fact that Hitachi builds trains and power plants and all manner of other big industrial stuff means it has industry expertise that other analytics and infrastructure companies lack.

Speaking of HDS' infrastructure products, they'll live on and keep evolving. Tate assured The Register that the company will keep building new storage kit and already has NVMe and software-defined storage in its sights. Vantara was revealed on the first day of Hitachi's NEXT conference and The Register understands that day two will feature news of some new infrastructure-related products and plans.

Vantara's hit the ground running by releasing a new version 2.0 of Lumada, the analytics-for-things product once the purview of Hitachi Insight Group. There's also a new Hitachi IoT Appliance designed to run Lumada out on the edge.

Tate made much of the fact that Vantara was announced by Hitachi president and CEO Toshiaki Higashihara, saying that his presence demonstrates the significance of the new venture and the importance to the entire group.

+LOGOWATCH Tate added that the name “Vantara” is no mere collection of pleasing syllables and was designed to convey a few meanings. The opening “V” is a homage to HDS' Virtual Storage Platform and to suggest that virtualization is part of the company's DNA. “Vant” is hoped to evoke both “vantage”, as it's hoped the company will let customers get a good view of their data, and that Vantara will therefore deliver an “advantage.”

The company's social feeds use the logo at the top of this story (or here for m.reg readers. Hitachi sometimes uses the same eye motif. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like