Hitachi Vantara ropes in former HPE executive Sheila Rohra as Chief Business Strategy Officer

To stay ahead of an ever-changing industry landscape and keep a finger on the pulse of emerging trends, Hitachi Vantara, the subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., announced that Sheila Rohra has been named Chief Business Strategy Officer (CBSO), effective immediately. The role will enable the company to further create and execute transformative strategies and provide new ways for customers to deal with the many opportunities and challenges they are facing.

Rohra reports directly to Gajen Kandiah, Hitachi Vantara’s Chief Executive Officer, and will serve on the company’s executive committee.

“Organizations like ours must keep one eye on running the business and the other on what lies ahead so that we are prepared for the demands of tomorrow,” said Kandiah. “Sheila has repeatedly demonstrated her ability to identify what’s next and create and execute a transformative strategy with great success. With her industry expertise and technical understanding of the many elements of our business – from infrastructure to cloud, everything as a service (XaaS), and differentiated services offerings, I believe Sheila can help us design a unified corporate strategy that will address emerging customer needs and deliver high-impact outcomes in the future.”

Most recently, Rohra served as the Senior Vice President and General Manager, Data Infrastructure Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), where she was responsible for a $2 billion global organization focused on providing distinguished primary storage with cloud-native data infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure to some of the world’s top Fortune 500 companies. Prior to HPE, she spent 10 years at NetApp in several roles, including chief transformation officer and senior vice president of customer success. While there, Rohra led a $3 billion P&L that included professional and managed services, support delivery, and XaaS, as well as a company-wide transformation strategy that drove significant improvement in top-line growth and operating margins. Before NetApp, she worked at Cisco Systems, leading business operations for the company’s core technology group and contributing to short- and long-term planning, product innovation, portfolio management, and process improvement initiatives. Rohra also serves on the board for Women in Engineering (WIE) for University of Maryland and for Ayati, an organization that helps young women and girls stay in school in rural India.

“Organizations are more challenged than ever when it comes to how they store, manage, and utilize their data,” said Rohra. "The challenges are only compounded against a backdrop of hybrid and multicloud complexities and growing macroeconomic uncertainty around the world. That's why I'm thrilled to join Hitachi Vantara at this time. Together, we have a unique opportunity to leverage our data-driven technologies, solutions, and capabilities to help customers personalize and co-create the solutions they need to meet their business objectives.”