Hitachi Digital To Double Workforce In India In Industrial IoT Push

After bringing all IT assets under the newly-created Hitachi Global Digital Holdings, Hitachi plans to double its India workforce in two years as it gears to get aggressive in the IT services space.

“We created a holding company called Hitachi Global Digital Holdings last April. And that has been Hitachi Vantara, Hitachi consulting, and also our social innovation business. So it has a lot of the assets or digital assets that allow us to start to go after digital and in a bigger way,” Hicham Abdessamad, President and CEO, Hitachi Consulting, told BusinessLine.

Hitachi Digital Holdings is now a $20 billion company, growing at high double-digits.

In India, the company has a workforce of about 2,500 which it plans to double in the next two years as it brings in new capabilities to target domestic customers and build global offerings.

“Our footprint, is going to be focused a lot on skills on digital business where we’ve got digital delivery, because as you get into these IoT projects and analytics, we need people who know how to write machine code and machine learning or Python. And so we’re leveraging that more and more around digital delivery,” Abdessamad said.

Globally, Hitachi has made two major acquisitions in the last three years — data analytics firm Pentaho and cloud computing firm Rean Cloud, which already has a large development team in India. So far, Hitachi has only been focused around selling its storage and server products in India. But now, the company plans to tap opportunities that combine capabilities from the two new companies as well.

Hitachi Digital is in direct competition with the likes of TCS and Infosys, which have long been its partners to sell hardware products.

Hitachi will stick to select industry verticals such as manufacturing, by offering industrial IoT solutions. The second big focus areas for Hitachi is urban mobility, where the company will leverage its expertise in making bullet trains and transportation networks to build solutions logistics, shipping and urban mobility sectors.

Abdessamad acknowledged that Hitachi doesn’t have a lot of capabilities in financial services. “ So we are trying to stick to industries where we have capabilities and knowledge to differentiate ourselves,” he said.

“If any traditional systems integrator goes in, they bring this breadth of delivery and industry expertise, we come in and say, we have 152 factories as well, we are in the same business as you are. And we also have an IT and consulting business and we can build a solution that solves your problem,” he said.

Hitachi will co-create solutions with large customers and then convert them into products that can be offered as a service to other customers in a pay-as-you-go model. That translates into creating software platforms that require little customisation and are easy to deploy and scale.

“Over time, I think that money is going to shift into digital applications sold as a service and implemented by a systems integrator. So there’s going to be a level of repeatability and scale that is needed for this whole industry to take off,” Abdessamad. – The Hindu Business Line