Techno Musings

Last year I blogged on Hitachi’s overall innovativeness and referenced that in 2010 we would be celebrating our 100th anniversary. Well this is the year, so Hitachi congratulations on turning 100.  As one of the few companies that has been around through the large scale electrification of the world to today where we have multi-terabyte hard disk drives and peta-scale storage systems, the scope of the celebration is pretty significant.
 One of the key things that I hear from analysts, you know who you are, is that the scale and diversity of Hitachi is a hinderance to HDS.  Huh?  From where I am today, I completely disagree with this premise.  In the past I’ve talked about technologies being applied from our nuclear power research to the compute and storage spaces, and there are also innovations on intelligent search systems, done in collaboration with university groups, inside of our storage management software.  Furthermore from being here in Japan the strength of the R&D labs is quite evident.

As the relationships deepen within the Hitachi Storage Solutions group, the stronger we actually become.  From process change, to innovations in technologies, to innovations in services and support practices the participation of HDS within the Hitachi Group is indeed a powerful thing to behold.  There are other things like the fundamental physics and materials which come from our R&D labs and find their way, well into your desktop with a Hitachi hard disk drive in your laptop or our USP-V. Our major competitor in the storage space largely “innovates” through acquisition not through R&D.  This is a fundamentally different approach to how Hitachi proceeds.  We invest in fundamental R&D and put the results in our offerings we bring to market.  We also have the fundamental research labs that are designed to look into things 10 or 20 years in the future.  Since the company’s inception, we have always looked into the betterment of society all the while actually trying minimize our impact on both the environment and society.

For more information on Hitachi’s history you can check out Hitachi’s website here and Wikipedia here.