News today from Hitachi is that the company is forming a new, standalone Silicon Valley-based unit to explore and execute upon opportunities within the Internet of Things.
This is interesting, since the parent group, Hitachi Limited, has a dizzying variety of business units, many (if not most) of which have their own IoT opportunities.
For Hitachi create a standalone unit is a bold move. The business, named the Hitachi Insight Group, is aimed at leveraging Hitachi’s long experience in industrial and IT fields and applying new technologies around four distinct markets: Smart City, Smart Energy, Smart Healthcare and Smart Industry.
This is not an entirely new area for Hitachi, after all the group as a whole had more than $5 billion (€4.4 billion) in IoT-related business in 2015 alone. But by integrating operational and IT expertise from across the group, an entirely new set of product offerings becomes possible.
Opportunities in the enterprise
While IoT examples are often given around consumer or household situations (the connected toothbrush or the connected refrigerator, for example), the reality is that industry, long a user of connected technologies such as SCADA and PLCs, is the bigger IoT opportunity.
“The greatest opportunity for IoT lies in the enterprise, industrial and public sector markets, which stand to benefit significantly from digital transformation. Although the market is still nascent, digitalisation is already disrupting traditional product-based business models, driving demand for solutions and an everything-as-a-service approach,” said Vernon Turner, senior vice president, enterprise systems and IoT research fellow at IDC.
To deepen its subject matter expertise across specific verticals, Hitachi Insight Group has entered into alliance with vendors such as AT&T, Ericsson, Eurotech, Intel, Microsoft, PTC and SAP. (Many of those, it must be said, have their own IoT ambitions. No word on how these potential conflicts will be resolved.)
New IoT platform
Alongside the announcement of the new business unit, Hitachi announced a new IoT platform, Lumada. Lumada is touted as an open and adaptable IoT platform. It was created by combining existing commercial technologies from across Hitachi’s portfolio to create a common platform to cover data orchestration, streaming analytics, content intelligence, simulation models and other Hitachi software technologies.
Lumada is delivered as a framework of IoT solution building blocks, including edge device and connectivity integration, application integration, data integration and orchestration, data repositories, stream and batch data processing, analytics, artificial intelligence, simulation tools, repeatable solution blueprints, and enterprise services. (That is not surprising given it is an amalgam of lots of different products.) Hitachi sees Lumada uniqueness across three different traits: openness, adaptability and security.
IDG News Service
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