Hemant Tiwari, MD VP, India SAARC, Hitachi Vantara, the infrastructure, data management and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., talks to businessline about the company’s recent partnership with Nvidia, India team’s global impact and Hitachi Vantara’s renewed focus on infrastructure in the age of AI.
What is the focus of Hitachi Vantara?
Hitachi Vantara is a 100per cent owned subsidiary of Hitachi Limited, the Japanese conglomerate. In2017, Hitachi Data Systems became Hitachi Vantara. In the past, people knew Hitachi as a storage company. We have repositioned ourselves as a company of relevance for customers to drive data innovation using our data-driven solutions.
Our focus is to help customers become data-driven and drive innovations with that approach. We primarily are a data infrastructure business and therefore, offer solutions for customers to manage the diverse and complex data pipeline in the organisation, through the entire life cycle - from when the data is conceived, till it is retired.
Every organisation today is inundated with a huge amount of data. This creates an opportunity for Hitachi as an organisation. We help customers transform their data landscape; we build infrastructure solutions and bring them to the industry. We are a storage and hybrid cloud infrastructure provider. We have infrastructure products, both hardware, software, and services solutions.
How is India contributing to the company? What kind of work is being done out of India?
India contributes to the global business. We have an India-based organisation responsible for taking our solutions to customers directly and through a large ecosystem of partners in the country. We have a large organisation that sells and provides solutions to our customers. Once we sell our solutions either directly or through partners, we help install, implement, and manage through the life cycle.
In 2019, we set up a global delivery centre in Hyderabad, which delivers global services to a large set of clients. Product engineering and development are done in locations like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Calcutta; we have a software integration and testing unit in Calcutta. We have a finance back office for Hitachi Vantara in India. We also have a large IT organisation that delivers IT services to our organisation globally.
Can you speak about the recent partnership with Nvidia? And what is happening on the AI front?
Many aspects of our lives are controlled by AI or GenAI, so we see this as a huge opportunity. We are a data innovation, data management, and data infrastructure management company, and want incredible amounts of data. This partnership with Hitachi and Nvidia is a global partnership with both Hitachi Ltd and Hitachi Vantara.
Hitachi Ltd has various global businesses. We have a legacy of operational technology (OT) experience and an IT arm. This is probably what attracted Nvidia. What brings this partnership together is the great value Hitachi can deliver around AI and GenAI.
Hitachi has invested significantly in putting together an AI lab in Japan. We are developing use cases around different verticals, including transportation, energy, technology, healthcare, and financial services, which we can then offer to the marketplace as ready-to-use models. They can be picked up by customers in those industry domains.
From a Hitachi Vantara perspective, we are clear. Nvidia manufactures GPUs, which process the AI data. However, data has to be pumped since GPUs do not generate it. This is where our role comes in -- to provide a storage platform underlying the GPUs. You need to push the data into the GPUs at scale, high speed, or performance.
Processed data has to be stored for some time, so it must be brought to a low-cost storage. The second layer in the storage or data pipeline solution we bring for the AI pipeline is the archival solution underlying the storage platform. We connect these solutions using high-speed switches.
Customers want a ready-to-use platform for AI pipelines and workloads to kick-start their work. The engineered and optimised solution we bring is Hitachi IQ, a branding for work in the AI and GenAI space. Under this branding, we offer these engineered infrastructure solutions to run AI projects for our customers.
Are you exploring other partnerships? What are some available AI use cases?
We kickstarted our AI initiative sometime in January and signed the Nvidia relationship in March. Then, we set up the AI lab in Japan. Hitachi Ltd is working on the use cases. We will be ready to offer industrial use cases to the market next year, maybe between March and June.
We have a customer in India - one of the global four consulting companies with whom we collaborated; they have built around 40 use cases around AI. We are exploring a partnership where we can bring together whatever they have done, to enterprise customers in India and abroad. These relationships get stitched together both at country and global levels.
Are customers open to adopting AI into their businesses? Is there a reluctance because the technology is in its nascent stages?
AI has been such a buzz globally that nobody can escape it. If you look at the balance sheets and financial statements of most companies, both globally and in India, you will find the mention of AI and GenAI. Regardless of customers’ hesitation, nobody has a choice today. You have to incorporate AI into your internal operations.
For example, when Hitachi Vantara builds storage products, we embed AI to help customers better operationalise their storage utilisation within their environment. In many of our global functions, we are embedding AI to become more agile, and efficient. We are using AI internally within the organisation and helping customers get the most out of AI through our solutions.
Even non-tech companies have AI requirements. If you’re manufacturing a transformer, a train engine, or a jet engine, AI goes into making them efficient. Every customer has an AI project in some stage, so they don’t have a hesitation anymore. I hear every customer talk about AI.