Data Center Advisors

That’s what the posters say on many walls across the company right now.  Why, you ask?  We’ve had quite a nice run of delivering industry leading financial results the past three years here at HDS, and just concluded another stellar fiscal year at the end of March.  But before I get into that, we’re proud for a number of equally meaningful reasons as well – in the past four months alone, we have been honored by being ranked in FORTUNE’s “100 Best Companies To Work For,” in Chief Executive’s“40 Best Companies for Leaders,” as well as being named to the Ethisphere Institute’s 2012 World’s Most Ethical Companies list for the second consecutive year.  All while delivering 15% year-over-year growth in the fiscal year FY11 just concluded in March, and achieving record consolidated revenues of $4.4 Billion.

How could we achieve such results in today’s hyper-competitive and uneven economic environment?  Simple.  Attract great people to execute a vision for information technology that is unmatched in the industry and solves real customer problems every day.  Our storage virtualization is the foundation for our solutions and is resonating now more than any other time in recent history due to the economic savings associated with reclaiming existing (heterogeneous) capacity and applying automated management capabilities to a single dynamic pool of storage.  This piece of our business grew more than 30% Y/Y in the quarter just ended but that doesn’t begin to tell the entire story.  The intelligence that can be layered on top to leverage this foundation as a single platform for all data is where the power of the solution can really be achieved.  Whether it be blocks, files or objects that are stored and managed, the level of integration (as evidenced by the recently announced Hitachi Unified Storage) is where the value proposition gets really interesting.  Our file and content portfolio (consisting of Hitachi Content Platform, Hitachi NAS and Hitachi Data Ingestor) grew more than 50% Y/Y in the just completed quarter and achieved record revenues as well.  The use cases range from cloud enablement and big data to simply content archiving, and the demand keeps growing.

The services wrapped around all of this is critical to customer success and we are working with the largest companies on the planet to transform their businesses, growing this portion of our business close to 20% last quarter.  Some people may be surprised to hear that software and services now account for nearly half of our overall revenue.  In addition, we were recently highlighted by Gartner as the top performing vendor in terms of revenue growth in the firm’s Storage Management Software Report. We achieved a remarkable 28.7% Y/Y growth in storage management software revenue for calendar year 2011, which was more than any other vendor.  Everything is geared towards our singular design goal of making our customers’ information matter.

So let’s recap the facts – a great place to work, recognized for developing future business leaders, operating with the highest of ethics and growing faster than almost every company in our chosen markets.  Sometimes you can’t help but feel proud.