HDS set to gain from Singapore's Smart Nation push

Singapore

JAPANESE storage major Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), part of the Hitachi group, saw steady growth in Singapore in fiscal 2014. The company feels that the technologies required to fulfil Singapore's ambition to become a smart nation will provide more opportunities for growth this year and in the coming years.

Ravi Rajendran, HDS' vice-president and general manager for Asean and India, noted that the company is well poised to address local industry concerns around storage environments due to the proliferation of data required to meet changing business demands.

With Singapore's push to become a smart nation, the requirement for big data and analytics, cloud computing, as well as the proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) enabled devices, will provide major growth opportunities for HDS.

Mr Rajendran noted that following the One Hitachi directive, the company intends to transform itself over the next few years into a market leader for big data and IoT.

"Social innovation is the unifying strategy across the Hitachi businesses to deliver solutions for IoT and big data - solutions that enable healthier, safer and smarter societies," he said.

He added that the company has continued to see strong performance globally and in the region. "For HDS, the Asean region grew in the single digit year-on-year in fiscal year 2014. We benefited from strong demand for infrastructure, data protection, converged solutions, content and mobility as well as cloud solutions."

More than 80 per cent of HDS' global customer base comes from the Fortune 100 companies, Mr Rajendran added.

Turning to the Singapore market, he noted that the country has established a comprehensive and robust infocomm infrastructure that has ensured competitiveness as a tech-enabled financial centre with next generation technology capabilities. "The last financial year was a record year for HDS in Singapore as well as the Asean region," he added.

Mr Rajendran said public cloud has gained popularity in the Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, because of its agility and flexibility to scale up or down based on users' needs. "This allows users to pay only for the resources they use, while keeping the focus on innovation and productivity on the infrastructure," he said.

According to Gartner, the public cloud services market in the Asia-Pacific region will reach US$7.4 billion this year, representing a 14 per cent increase from US$6.5 billion in 2014.

Gartner also predicts that the total cloud services spending in the Asia-Pacific will hit US$11.5 billion.

Mr Rajendran noted that embracing public cloud comes with underlying concerns such as data control, data security and single vendor lock-in.

"HDS understands the dilemma that organisations face and, therefore, it offers options to help manage the multiple demands of IT, including explosive growth of unstructured data, user expectations to access information from anywhere and the requirement to ensure security, simplicity and protection of all data wherever it lives.

"For example, the single storage platform, Hitachi Content Platform, allows IT organisations and cloud service providers to easily store, share, synchronise and protect unstructured data files. It is more efficient, easier to use and handles much more data than traditional file storage solutions. It is the backbone for the 'free flow' of data and powers the concept of data, workforce and cloud mobility," he added.

Mr Rajendran noted that HDS has also made great transformational strides as a company. "With the recent acquisitions, HDS aims to better serve the market needs in the Asean region by transforming itself from a data storage provider to a leader in infrastructure management, converged computing, content management and mobility, big data and analytics, and cloud computing."

He added that the intersection between business and IT is more critical than ever before. There is now a need for IT to embrace the third platform that is built on mobile devices, cloud services, social networks and big data analytics.

"With HDS' transformation into a better service enterprise, customers around the region can look forward to seeing greater collaborations between HDS and our parent company Hitachi, as well as our partners and technology alliances across the industry. All this will translate to more end-to-end solutions that are integrated, unified and open."

Mr Rajendran added that the company's transformation journey has been very much about keeping not just in step with technological transformations in terms of data, but about leading it.

"We're innovators. That's why we've progressed from being just a provider of data storage solutions to one that now provides IT infrastructure that helps businesses store, manage, compute, analyse and act on all sorts of data. The transformation journey we've been on has really been about asking, 'What else can we do to add value to data, to make it work and help the organisations that use it?'"

Mr Rajendran noted that HDS' recent acquisitions of oXya, Pantascene and Avrio RMS Group, as well as the publicly announced intention to acquire Pentaho, all aim to help customers derive greater value from big data, IoT and cloud computing.

"These companies' vision of the inter-connectedness of people and things supported by a big data orchestration platform to power embedded analytics aligns perfectly with HDS' broad commitment to social innovation."

He added that the company is leveraging the strength of the Hitachi portfolio of businesses in industrial markets, business consulting, IT platforms, systems integration, data integration, data science and analytics.

"HDS brings its own expertise in developing and delivering to customers whole solutions that include software, services, analytics and data management. Using that combined expertise, we are developing a shared analytics platform with reusable components and best practices that lets us accelerate solution development within HDS and across Hitachi," Mr Rajendran said.