Japanese social innovation firm Hitachi has unified the operations of its subsidiaries Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho into one integrated business, Hitachi Vantara.
The new business entity is said to leverage the broad portfolio of innovation, development and experience from across Hitachi Group companies to deliver data-driven solutions for commercial and industrial enterprises globally.
The new firm will be led by former Hitachi Data Systems COO Brian Householder.
According to president and CEO Toshiaki Higashihara, the $4 billion company with more than 7 000 employees will supply the analytics, infrastructure, software and services needed for organisations to embrace digital transformation.
"Hitachi Vantara marks a monumental change for Hitachi. Now as the world is being transformed by digital tools and processes, we are unifying our digital solutions companies together as a new company that delivers exponential business impact for our customers and the betterment of society," he says.
"The formation of this company underscores our commitment to collaborative creation with customers and partners, and being a true innovation partner for the era of Internet of things (IOT)."
Higashihara adds that in a bid to directly address the market, Hitachi Vantara has launched an IOT platform offering, version 2.0 of its Lumada IOT platform, with updated artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics capabilities.
"The new software stack is designed to help customers gain insights, predictions and recommendations from their data and it will run both on-premises or in the cloud and support industrial IOT deployments both at the edge and in the core," he says.
The Hitachi Lumada IOT platform was originally created in 2016 to help the company develop and deploy IOT technologies.
The company notes: "Notable differences and advancements include asset avatars that provide a digital representation of physical assets and rich metadata for analytics, serving as a digital proxy for business and industrial assets. The newly enhanced software stack also provides IOT developers and architects with design tools and features that simplify the creation and deployment industrial IOT solutions."
IOT deployment within enterprises is on a steady rise, with Gartner predicting more than $440 billion will be spent on IOT in 2020 and that there will be more than 21 billion connected sensors and endpoints, and digital twins that will exist for potentially billions of things in the same timeframe.
"We are exceedingly proud of the next-generation Lumada software stack we are delivering to the market and opening up to developers," says Rich Rogers, senior vice-president of engineering and product management at Hitachi Vantara.
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