The newly carved Hitachi Vantara to drive industry transformations

While speaking to VARINDIA, Raghuram Krishnan, Director of Partners and Alliances, Hitachi Vantara India reflects on how the new and enhanced portfolio is boosting up the confidence of its partners while also emphasizing on why channel involvement in doing business in today’s marketplace is so important -
 

When Hitachi Vantara was launched in September 2017, the aim was to leverage the broad portfolio it offers as a company, which includes innovation, experience and development from across Hitachi Group companies. By unifying the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho into a single entity, Hitachi Vantara today capitalises on a century worth of OT expertise combined with more than 50 years of IT experience. 

“We strongly believe that we can bring value to our customers through our partner network. In return, market opportunities and transitions can be successfully executed by expanding channels that reach customers. By bringing our data-driven solutions and services to the market, Hitachi Vantara has continued to help customers achieve tangible outcomes that positively drive business and society forward,” says Raghuram Krishnan, Director of Partners and Alliances, Hitachi Vantara India.

Channel plans for Hitachi Vantara…
Hitachi Vantara in India is largely an indirect sales organization, and this reflects its confidence and trust in its partner ecosystem and the value that they bring to their customers. It also strongly believes that value-addition is most successful when it is bi-directional. With its new and current portfolio, the company brings value to its partners by helping them scale up the value chain with their customers, by addressing their core business issues. Recently, it has also made variations to its go-to market and channel strategies for its India partners. 

As an important extension of its team, Hitachi Vantara’s partners help its customers meet IT demands and achieve business objectives with its innovative solutions. Hitachi Vantara’s partners are now grouped into 3 pillars - transformational partners, strategic partners and growth partners. This helps to focus its efforts on enabling its digital integrators to create innovative solutions and services that cater to existing as well as new markets.

With an aim to collaborate with highly focussed partners and provide integrated solutions to customers, Hitachi Vantara has launched a new collaborative channel program with a select few partners. They would be managed directly by Hitachi Vantara, giving them access and benefits, comparable and in most cases better than industry standards. “We are working on a reverse engineering model where we will be exploring to do more with less, thereby giving enough market opportunities to our partners to address and grow their business. The key differentiator would be Hitachi Vantara’s innovative models of selling to customers via these focussed partners. This is extremely disruptive, and we are confident we will transform the way customers buy from our partners. We want to collaborate with our partners to penetrate newer markets and improve our reach,” explains Raghu.

Hitachi Vantara is also actively investing in building a capacity and capability matrix which will help the company in achieving its vision of a self-reliant, value selling profitable ecosystem of partners capable of addressing the requirements of every segment of the market. Its new and enhanced channel framework will now help partners collaborate and help create more value for their customers.

“With the pace at which digital technologies are disrupting the industry, business leaders are investing in different business models to meet the current requirements of the industry. One of our unique propositions is the adoption of value co-creation approach with our partners with a single objective of helping our customers in their journey of Digital Transformation. As a company, we have a comprehensive portfolio of co-creation capabilities and proven methodologies with our established collaboration processes,” says Raghu.

Finally…
The marketplace opportunities for data management and infrastructure are massive. This includes customers from banking, telecom, manufacturing, ITeS, healthcare and government sectors. Given the recent impacts that advancements in technologies like IoT, cloud computing, data analytics, connected intelligence and storage are undergoing, it will become increasingly important for companies to expand their channel to reach target customers and create a partner ecosystem that is relevant. 

In addition, Hitachi Vantara believes that the channel must adapt their ways to leverage market gaps and address these opportunities to enhance customer experience, become more cost-efficient, and decrease the go-to market time. Skilling up and Skilling out is the new mantra for channel success.