Predictable, Profitable & Pioneering are the strong principles of hitachi's partner program

Anupam Nagar
Senior Director - Channels and Alliance
Hitachi Vantara 

What are the core competencies of Hitachi Vantara and how are you serving the industry with various ranges of Storage solutions?

Hitachi is a unique company on the planet which has a combination of IT and OT expertise, as well as existing technology assets and domain expertise. With more than 119,00 patents, an annual R&D budget of $2.9 billion and more than 2,700 employees dedicated to innovation, our solutions provide superior data management, data governance, data mobility, data analytics and IoT technologies. Hitachi Vantara is a Data-Ops company. We remain committed to innovating in our infrastructure portfolio to help our customers handle their data while charting a path to the future of analytics and IoT to optimise data on the edge.  

“We have a stated position of acquiring #1 position in the enterprise segment of the external storage market and gaining market share in the mid-market and mid-sized enterprise segment. Our new product announcements and investments in the partner ecosystem, give us a clear sight of the goal. We expect our partners to evolve along with us in terms of expertise, coverage and therefore sales and branding.” 

Our goal is to build a partner network that is self-sustaining, value-selling, and sustainable, which forms the crux of our channel strategy in India. To do this, we empower our partners to invest in eligible resource selling solutions and provide their clients with deep and substantive interaction leveraging their resources and complementary services and expertise. We have significant and attractive investments lined up for our partners who drive our growth in Midrange and Mid-Market segments in terms of focussed marketing, tele-calling and enablement training apart from commercial incentives. 

As digital transformation is core of every business of the enterprises, how Hitachi Vantara is addressing their needs into infrastructure demand? 

India was on a constant growth trajectory always. However, over the last 3 to 4 years, the growth has accelerated even further and will continue to do so for the next 5 years – current Covid being just a temporary inconvenience. The digital transformation of businesses has led to a significant increase in the creation, consumption, and analysis of data. Several new processes and technologies need to be introduced to support consumers with their Data Ops projects that fuel their Digital Transformation. 

We at Hitachi Vantara offer a very robust portfolio of products and solutions for enabling Digital Transformation to our customers with their data – Solutions to STORE their data, ENABLE their data, ACTIVATE their data and then MONITIZE their data.

Our portfolio provides Industry’s best building blocks, Customized and Engineered Appliances and several packaged solutions with our Alliance Partners such as Cisco, VmWare, Broadcom, Commvault and Veritas. We add to it our highly reliable Support and Professional Services and Industry’s only 100% Data Availability Guarantee.  Our partners help us to enable our customers to consume our solutions on the model of their choice – Outright purchase, Opex or As-A-Service.

Can you share the GTM strategy for India business and how are you integrating the partner eco-system into your business?

At Hitachi Vantara, we are immensely proud of how tightly we match our technology activities with our main technology and Go-To-Market partners. We have a deep community of collaborators in India who will take advantage of our technologies, combine them with their IPs and drive the roll-out of solutions. We go to market with some very skilled and accomplished GSIs, VARs, ISVs and Value-added Distributors. Our Sales and Services teams work with them in the Enterprise Segment and we have a unique Partner-led model in the Commercial Segment. Our Enablement engine keeps all our partners skilled to provide the best solutions to our customers. Our new Midrange solutions are Partner-only solutions for Sales and Support, giving them significant opportunities to augment their Services revenues. 

Pls. share about your Partner Programme, which is believed to be the key driver of most of the business houses

Hitachi Vantara Partner Program is based on three key principles: 
•    Predictable: Established, potential evidence offerings that exploit an integrated portfolio and transparent standards for third party incorporation and repeatability
•    Profitable: Create IP and service catalogue using automation software in a repeatable, productive way that expands touchpoints and enhances consumer value.
•    Pioneering: Extend relevance across consumers by aligning technologies and market results at the IT level with the Innovation Hub.

These principles are at the core of our Partner Program design since a well-structured partner programme that is easy to follow, understand and useful to all parties is important. Any Innovative Partner Program cannot be static – it must change in line with business imperatives and it should also be able to create the desired change. Our program incorporates these changes based on the constant feedback we receive from our Partner Community. Our Partner Program provides our partners with the necessary skills, tools and information required to provide right solutions to our customers. They have access to some of the best tools to assist them in their marketing efforts and Customer Proposal building. Along with increased partner benefits with increase in partnership levels they also have access to a unique Rebate program to reward them for their efforts in mutually agreed segments and initiatives. 

What are the new solutions that Hitachi Vantara has introduced recently to address the sizable demand in the industry?  

Early this year Hitachi Vantara released its entry-level storage system, the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G130, for the Indian market. VSP G130 is an evolution of VSP G series hybrid flash systems that support smaller data centre upgrade projects and include agile data storage with reduced expense to SMBs, remote or branch offices that need local backup capacities, DAS environments, and streamlined virtual server deployments. With the announcement of the new Storage family – the VSP 5000 family and the VSP 990 family and a range of Digital Services solutions, we have a large portfolio that our clients will carry to their customers and win big. 

Recently, Hitachi Vantara announced new offerings to Support Data Infrastructure needs of Midsized Enterprises. The expansion of its E Series line of high performance- NVMe all-flash arrays will provide new all-flash storage solutions, virtual storage as a service offering, new NAS product and expanded revenue opportunities for partners.