Hitachi Data Systems CTO Comments on Booming Cloud Business
Although Hitachi Data Systems has made its mint selling datacenter storage equipment, a candid interview with CTO Adrian De Luca was recently posted at ZDNet which details the storage giant’s future plans. HDS’s journey isn’t unique; many traditional IT vendors are looking to reinvent themselves as a cloud powerhouse. By all measures, HDS is excelling in this endeavor.
In the interview, De Luca began talking about how HDS’s enterprise sales have stayed steady while the overall business has grown due to hybrid and private cloud. De Luca explains, “Our enterprise customers have a lot of legacy systems; they’ve got legacy skills and fixed investments such as data centers, so for them it seems like a quantum leap to move the cloud. So they need to typically take smaller and more incremental steps into cloud. What we’ve done is tried to build a journey for a lot of those customers. It’s something we call ‘your cloud, your way’.”
Your cloud, your way is achieved by partnerships that HDS has setup with existing cloud vendors. While HDS is not a full blown Infrastructure as a Service offering, De Luca goes on to mention that “HDS is a partner-centric company. Unlike IBM and HP, they want to build the data center and run them. We know what we’re really good at but we also recognize the things that we need to partner with.”
De Luca’s straight talk approach has certainly won HDS high praise. HDS recently formed a partnership with Infosys that covered extensively in the news. Infosys mentioned that HDS would “help improve operational efficiencies and facilitate smooth transition of their IT infrastructure to new cloud-based environments.”
Aimee Chanthadavong, contributor at ZDNet, conducted the interview with De Luca and at the end of her article; she mentioned that “The only challenge now for the company is to convince the rest of the market that HDS is serious about being a key cloud vendor.”
