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Our Commitments in the Face of the Continuing COVID-19 Crisis

By Gajen Kandiah

Just a few months ago, many of us saw a glimmer of light at the end of the pandemic tunnel with growing availability of vaccines and a temporary flattening of the COVID-19 curve. However, with surges in COVID-19 cases in areas around the globe, we continue to reconsider what more we can do to help our friends and family, our society, our community, our colleagues, clients and partners. At Hitachi Vantara, “how” we do business matters every bit as much as the business we do.

First and foremost, we remain committed to health and wellbeing of our employees, clients and partners in the midst of this pandemic and are proud of how our global and local teams have rallied to support each other during this time. Our business continuity plans remain in place to not only ensure wellbeing, but also to minimize risk to business operations for our clients and maintain inventory and a means for service delivery. We are leveraging all tools and assets at our disposal to do so.

For our Hitachi colleagues who have been directly impacted themselves or within their close circle of family or friends, we are providing employee assistance programs, including extended medical coverage, financial support, and time to recover. We are proud to see our teams in high-impact areas actively engaged in various community efforts – from identifying plasma donors, coordinating hospital admissions, delivering emergency medicines and supplies to supporting blood donations and organizing food drives.

We remain committed to continuous service delivery. As since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, the majority of our employees have been operating business as usual remotely. Of course, with new spikes in outbreaks in areas like India, we are carefully monitoring the situation and are prepared to mobilize our global delivery centers in Vietnam, Poland, Malaysia as well as those in the U.S. and the U.K. to ensure no lapse in client services. We are also reallocating internal resources, leveraging contingent workers, initiating backfill hiring and other strategies to further minimize any potential disruption to services or project delivery.

Clients can leverage remote service delivery or our ‘smart hands’ approach, where our experts advise local staff to troubleshoot issues. If remote support, smart hands or other remediation solutions are insufficient to resolve a client issue, we will carefully review requests for criticality before sending staff on-site. The safety of our employees, clients and partners is paramount and we will not unnecessarily expose any of them to potential health risks if it can be avoided.

We remain committed to product availability. We have sufficient inventory in our key geographies and have not experienced any significant interruptions to our supply chain to date that would impact our ability to meet client orders.

None of us could have predicted the scope, duration, or impact of this virus. After more than a year, we continue to stand alongside each of you as we weather this storm. Our hearts go out to those impacted by COVID-19, particularly in areas like India that is currently seeing exponential growth in cases.

On behalf of Hitachi Vantara, I hope that you and your loved ones stay safe and healthy. As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to understand how we can help.

Gajen Kandiah is CEO at Hitachi Vantara.
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