October 24, 2023
Over the last few decades, I have been a part of and have overseen some significant shifts in strategy that were brought on by a combination of internal and external forces, like new innovations, changing customer habits, and new market trends.
As business leaders, it is our responsibility to pay attention and to anticipate these shifts. Doing so enables us to move decisively to meet the changing tide head-on, rather than getting left behind and spending months and even years working to catch up to more agile competitors.
To even the casual observer, the pace of innovation has only accelerated in recent years. From the mass adoption of hybrid cloud to the rocket rise of Generative AI, just to name a couple of fast-moving trends, the demand for services and expertise has reached a new high. So much so, that it was time to transform Hitachi Vantara’s digital solutions business into a separate entity, unto itself, to put an even sharper focus on the business and its customers.
Enter Hitachi Digital Services
With the announcement of Hitachi Digital Services, our parent company, Hitachi Ltd., has identified the rising market trends and moved decisively to leverage and grow with them. The massive growth in technology services is clear. Researchers estimate this sector to be a $1.3T market, with CAG rate of 4-6%. In fact, the cloud and digital segments are expected to enjoy a CAG of 11-13%.
These figures reflect what we’ve been hearing from customers for the past couple of years: hybrid cloud architectures are growing more complex, requiring more efficient management; data continues to flood the data centers, stalling everything from analytics to AI; IoT is booming and demanding heightened awareness and support to derive consistent insights. And on top of it all, the demand for the integration of IT and OT systems – an area long-served by Hitachi – is intensifying.
This is the backdrop of our new venture. And we plan to emerge as the digital solutions provider of choice by helping and partnering with customers to transform their enterprises with edge-to-core solutions.
We’ll do it through system integration work for both IT and OT, through cloud, data, and IoT. For starters, these areas are closely interlinked and brought to life with our celebrated Hitachi Application Reliability Centers (HARC) and solutions. We will build on these centers over the course of the next several years to expand both their capabilities and availability.
Through HARC, as well as other services, we’ll also leverage our work in cloud, data, and IoT, to enable customers to interconnect their IT/OT systems to generate more consistent and holistic business insights from across their enterprises to drive growth with agility and at scale.
From Generative AI to Platforms
New technologies will continue to play a fundamental role here at Hitachi Digital Services. We will continue to leverage and build with Generative AI for and with our customers. We’ll assume a “shaper” role for our customers, actively co-creating exciting new solutions for them to use internally and in service of their customers to drive business growth. We’ll also continue to aggressively leverage Generative AI within our organization to continually improve processes and operations, from speeding code development to enhancing lead generation.
We are also intensifying our platform-centric approach to help customers capture the benefits of scalability, achieve faster value realization, and lower risks.
Driving Toward the Future
We know that enterprises are looking for help in driving integrated transformations. They’re turning to multiple offerings that typically get bundled together and are supported by a unified operating model that works across implementation, DevOps and RunOps. These are exactly the types of services and solutions that we will continue to focus on and advance. In fact, our foundational building blocks include solutions dedicated to cloud migrations/modernization, managed services (CloudOps), site reliability engineering, and Data Ops/ ML Ops.
In addition to all of this, we will double-down on our work to bridge companies’ IT and OT systems, and as part of this effort align even more tightly with our Hitachi business unit partners, Hitachi Energy and Hitachi Rail, each a leader in their respective industries. This ability to leverage our collective expertise to bring customers across industries innovative solutions is uniquely Hitachi, and unique in the industry.
It is a very exciting time to be in this industry. With the rapid rise of Generative AI and all that it will mean to business and society, to the integration of IT and OT, and to the promise of more efficient hybrid clouds, the energy level among our teams, our customers, and partners couldn’t be higher.
I’m thrilled about our future as an organization and excited about the work we’ll be doing with all our customers and partners in the coming days, months, and years.
Roger Lvin is CEO, Hitachi Digital Services.
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