Data Center Advisors

A colleague and I were recently visiting a customer to solicit some feedback about our future roadmaps.  During the meeting, he made a comment related to Legos.  Our customer mentioned that all of his vendors come in and show him the individual Legos that they sell (server, integrated networking, storage, software, etc.) but nobody can sell them the picture of what the solution looks like with the pieces are snapped together, much like what is on the box in which Lego pieces come.

Being the strategist that I am, I left this meeting with a lot of ideas in my head. Being a customer myself not long ago at the largest airline in the world, I used to have the same thoughts and the question came to mind, “Why can’t someone find a way to put all of these different parts together and deliver them to me as an integrated platform?”

Based upon this experience on the customer side, I began thinking about Hitachi and all of its intellectual property that is sold around the globe as individual parts. I began to think, “Why can’t we take all of these different pieces of IP and bundle them together?” In fact, this is exactly what our competitors are doing.

One company sells storage and virtualization software but doesn’t sell servers, so they fill the hole through acquisition.  Then, they form a partnership and give it an “ABC” type of name or create another offering with the word “Flexible” in the name. In reality, there is not a company that can offer the complete integrated platform that Hitachi can.

Integrated Platforms & Pervasive Computing

What you are going to read from me on Techno-Musings going forward is how integrated platforms are leading their way to what I define as “Pervasive Computing.” What is pervasive computing?  I consider pervasive computing to be what is next after cloud computing. Pervasive computing allows for an Integrated Chip (IC) to be installed anywhere such as your fork where it measures calorie intake, your cars to detect more intelligent safety and communication protocols or a soccer ball that may or may not have crossed the goal line in World Cup soccer.

Pervasive computing is our tomorrow and we need to begin planning for this technology and the way we begin doing so is to combine all of Hitachi’s intellectual property into converged packaged solutions that are easy, fast and cheap for our customers to deploy. We believe that now is the time to help address customer problems with the cornerstones of Hitachi technologies, which are reliability and performance.

Because, if you think about it, why would customers want to buy a solution from multiple companies that have no integrated abilities to manage the entire stack as a “Certified Solution”?