Techno Musings

A glib title, but none the less I hope it captures the major theme of this week: the formal celebration of Hitachi’s 100th birthday at the Hitachi uValue convention in Japan.  Hitachi Data Systems and Hitachi Ltd. jointly hosted industry analysts, industry bloggers, and technology focused international press in Japan this week for uValue and other briefings.  Hitachi’s President, Hiroaki Nakanishi, kicked off the event with a keynote speech where he discussed Hitachi’s 100 year history and pointed the company forward towards the next 100 years and beyond — hence the title for the post — where the focus is on applying Hitachi’s capabilities in various sectors towards the betterment of society.  After the keynote presentation we were treated to a group interview by a former HDS CEO Shinjiro Iwata.  He was extremely candid and open about a variety of subjects.  Iwata-san talked about  and answered questions surrounding HDS’s global success, where Hitachi overall will push to accelerate globalization, the adoption of startup paced development processes, etc. (Note I’m sure that one of the press or industry bloggers will comment on Iwata-san’s short speech and Q&A session so I will leave the detail to them.)  I was particularly happy when after dinner one of the noted industry analysts said that he was happy to hear from Iwata-san and remarked on just how candid and open the discussion was.

The group spent time on the show floor, as is expected with any convention of this scope, however I had to escape both for an internal meeting and to prepare for a speech that I gave as well.  (As soon as the materials are posted I will update the post with the appropriate URL to them.)  The title and abstract of my speech were/are:

Title: Hitachi Data Systems’ Advanced Customers; Expanding Hitachi’s reach by opening its innovation to the World

Abstract: Because Hitachi’s storage products have reached worldwide markets, Hitachi’s innovative spirit has been exposed globally.  Resulting from this global exposure are requests from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) customers for Hitachi to do more.  This presentation covers several HDS customers’ use cases and proposes how Hitachi can do more.

タイトル：海外先進顧客事例にみる日立のストレージイノベーション

内容：日立のストレージ製品は、気象データのアーカイブや規制 / コンプライアンスへの対応など、海外でもお客さまのさまざまなビジネス課題解決をご支援してきました。これらを通し日立の開拓者精神に高い評価をいただき、お客さまとより深い信頼関係を築くに至ったと考えています。今後もグローバルビジネスの拡大、ユニファイド・コンピューティング・プラットフォーム、R & Dの活動を通じ、お客さまの未来への成長をご支援します。本セミナーではこれまでの日立の取り組みを事例を交えてご紹介するとともに、最新ソリューションについてもご説明します。

My presentation really talked about the current macro market shift towards customers being more active about mining OPEX for reinvestment in their businesses, HDS’s vision to help these customers and how we help them today with our existing offerings. (Hey I was also fortunate to have some of the Hitachi personnel who are were a part of the engineering efforts to make the HDS vision a reality.  Specifically there were people from the original Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager team and from the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite Engineering and QA teams.  Thank you all for coming to see me speak, and thank you for all of the efforts for turning dreams into reality.)

After describing how our offerings can achieve our vision today, I spent some time showing how our customers were taking advantage of the reality of this vision to solve real business problems.  While I won’t mention NASA’s use of the Hitachi Content Platform again — especially since Nakanishi-san referenced NASA’s use of HCP to contain satellite data for recording environmental changes over time — I will refer another customer Klinikum through the image below.

(Note – within the image above are pictures of Hitachi Medical MRI systems, and studies from the systems.)

The conclusion of my presentation referenced four innovations which are available today through documentation online or as the combination of scholarly papers and demonstration services.  Two examples I discussed were Gazopa Bloom and Super Resolution — again instead of repeating the materials from the slide I’ve incorporated it here for convenience.

Examples of how these innovations could be used to make a real impact on society include:

• Renew older content for the digital TV era
• Find evidence of disease before it is usually detectable
• Locate dangerous or suspicious objects
• Mine visual assets to generate new value
• Match past environmental events to current events to save lives
• Imagine what is Next…

My reasoning for organizing this presentation as I did was that with the centennial anniversary this year, I feel it is important to get the message out and reinforce the innovative spirit of Hitachi.  (Note for more information on the 100th including links to my blog as well as the Hitachi R&D portal you can go here.)  After the conclusion of my presentation there was a rousing and refreshing 15 minute Q&A session that I really enjoyed.  There were specific product questions, questions on the future of consolidated storage architectures, cloud adoption, and finally on how to commercialize innovations in an increasingly global society.

Finally we had a heck of a dinner with a gaggle of really happy and interesting people. There was a lot of beer and other spirits consumed, and we even got Rick to eat sea urchin and tricked Greg into eating tuna.  The evening was generally full of good spirit and cheer, and overall I’m sincerely happy to have shared much of my week with everyone and also feel happy to share my heartfelt belief that Hitachi is a company who is honestly trying to make society a better place to live in.  So THANKS ALL!!!!!