Intelligent digital infrastructure and data platforms to reduce data center energy consumption and carbon footprint. Expertise to help you uncover insights to enable data-driven sustainability.
Explore Sustainable SolutionsNavigating the private, hybrid, and multicloud landscape can be complex. Ensure your success with an integrated approach to modernizing core infrastructure, apps, and data to achieve your objectives.
See Modernize the Digital CoreAdapt to the needs of future workloads with a modern edge-to-core-to-cloud infrastructure that delivers efficiency, agility, and resilience.
Explore Modern InfrastructureSupport the evolving demands of today’s enterprise workloads with modern data infrastructure.
Explore App InfrastructureDeliver services through a centralized, infinitely scalable platform, providing native S3 integration, faster data access, and reduced TCO across hybrid and multicloud architectures.
See Cloud App InfrastructureManage IT service levels, not infrastructure, with a central operating model across data centers, the edge, and public clouds.
Hybrid Cloud InfrastructureExperience VMware with greater simplicity, resilience, and agility. Your workloads, at the right performance, and the right cost. It's all in the Power of +.
Visit Hybrid Cloud with VMwareMaximize the value, scalability, and flexibility of your data with EverFlex infrastructure, data protection, and storage as a service.
Explore EverFlex XaaSGain visibility, fuel analytics/data-driven decisions, and speed innovation. Data modernization services and DataOps solutions help you take control of your data, from edge to core to cloud.
Explore Data ModernizationProtect customer and user experience with solutions to drive agility and availability to meet fast changing needs, prevent downtime, and guard against cyberattacks and other threats.
Explore Data ProtectionDrive total data quality, and cut time to insight from weeks to hours, with Lumada DataOps. Democratize access, simplify management, reduce costs, automate scalability, and more.
Explore Intelligent DataOpsManage data across cloud environments with DataOps. Enable governance and compliance, reduce risk, and leverage tribal knowledge to drive better decisions, insight, and competitive advantage.
Explore Cloud Data ManagementBuild data lakes and warehouses and make data actionable using DataOps for superior onboarding, cost optimization, protection, and discovery, using accurate, relevant data.
Visit Data Lakes & WarehousesDeliver automated, agile data workflows, from edge to multicloud environments, regardless of data volume, variety, or velocity.
Explore Data IntegrationJump-start your AI-driven enterprise with advanced analytics and trusted solutions for achieving proven business outcomes.
Explore AI-Driven SolutionsBuild, modernize, and manage critical apps across the enterprise and ecosystem with agility, while driving innovation and reducing TCO.
See Application ModernizationComprehensive services to optimize resilience and cost for always-on business. Design, build, run, and operate workloads across private, public, hybrid, and multicloud environments.
Visit App Reliability CentersPlan and migrate to cloud, and build cloud-ready applications while ensuring business agility and elastic scalability.
Explore Cloud ModernizationStay ahead by building a business-centric, customized application portfolio with next-gen technologies, using modern engineering principles, automation, and expertise.
Explore Digital EngineeringMaximize value from SAP ERP applications with our expertise and support. Leverage data to drive insights and create innovative solutions to your toughest business challenges.
Explore SAP ERP ModernizationOptimize your Oracle applications with our expert support. Improve agility, performance, and results through better business decisions and processes.
Visit Oracle ERP ModernizationDigital transformation is accelerating across all industries, driving the need for greater innovation, agility and resilience. Get there faster with data-driven industrial operations.
Visit IoT Solutions OverviewSmart spaces are emerging everywhere. Get started creating yours, leveraging insights from video, Lidar, and IoT to create smart spaces that are healthier, safer, more sustainable, and more.
Explore Smart SpacesCreate competitive advantage via data-driven insight, automation, and processes. Address production challenges, enable visibility, improve loyalty with predictive models, and more.
Explore Manufacturing InsightsLeverage visual intelligence solutions to automate your infrastructure and asset inspection processes to reduce risk, improve public safety, and extend life cycles.
Explore Inspection InsightsDeploy data-driven asset health and performance insights to keep your assets delivering optimum performance, safety, reliability, and value with Lumada Asset Performance Management.
Explore Lumada APMLumada Field Services Management is a scalable, intuitive inspection, maintenance, and repair solutions that equips mobile users to execute work orders with optimal efficiency.
Explore Lumada FSMLumada Enterprise Asset Management enables industrial organizations to optimize outcomes by managing physical assets throughout their life cycle at reduced operating cost and capital investment.
Explore Lumada EAMTransform your business supported by a trusted partner with deep experience in every aspect of data operations, across multiple industries and technologies.
Industry Solutions OverviewThe future belongs to those who capitalize on change. The right partner can help you accelerate digital maturity, create real customer value, and steer your path to success.
Financial Services SolutionsCapitalize on the value of data from across the business ecosystem to enable superior outcomes. Create end-to-end visibility, resilience, and responsiveness to drive industrial digitalization.
Manufacturing SolutionsStreamline operations and accelerate energy transition to create competitive advantage and reduce risk in an increasingly complex and dynamic business environment.
Energy and Utilities SolutionsTurn massive data stores and types into opportunities using intelligent automation. Enable better decisions, gain deeper patient insights, improve lives, and enhance your organization.
Healthcare & Life SciencesIntegrate data from disparate sources to build a foundation for omnichannel retail success. Reveal unique insights, optimize operations and deliver superior customer experiences.
Retail Industry SolutionsLeverage data to build and support successful, healthy communities and economies using innovative data solutions for national, state, and local government.
Solutions for GovernmentEnhance transportation safety, efficiency, and experience, and enable digital innovation and monetization across the passenger travel, transit, freight, and logistics markets.
Solutions for TransportationOur commitment to innovation is why we are consistantly ranked as the most reliable and trusted storage platforms available. Thats why 88% of the worlds leading global banks trust their data to Hitachi Vantara.
Explore MoreFor the last 22 years we offer 100% data availability guaranteed on all VSP models. That’s why 85% of the Fortune 100 trust Hitachi storage.
Explore MoreUnleash the potential of your unstructured data, our integrated approach accelerates the value of data by combining enhanced cloud data management and accelerated performance to meet modern application demands.
Explore MoreTrusted for more than 40 years Hitachi ensures mainframe solutions are helping you get the most out of your data no matter it lives.
Explore MoreHitachi gives you to power to handle any type of workload challenge. From intelligent storage to automated disaster recovery, we have a simple solution for you.
Explore MoreThis is the software that provides all the awesome features for our storage platforms. From data replication to virtualization, SVOS delivers it all!
Explore MoreNow your storage is self-driving with AIOps management, analytics and automation. One management suite for all your storage solution needs.
Explore MoreDistributed applications need the right storage. VSS has full VSP integration with enterprise support running on prem or in the cloud.
Explore MoreEasily enhance data protection to support business continuity and cyber resilience in ways that work best for your business -- in the cloud and on-prem.
Explore MoreAccelerate data-driven transformation. Deliver trusted data by optimizing your data fabric with an intelligent DataOps portfolio, to experience data from edge to multicloud.
Explore MoreIntelligent data discovery and transformation improves productivity by revealing insights more quickly to make your business smarter.
Explore MoreRapidly build and deploy data pipelines for end-to-end data integration and analytics at enterprise scale. Integrate data lakes, data warehouses, and devices, and orchestrate data integration flow across all environments.
Explore MoreTrust in Data by Mastering, Classification, Quality and Governance.
Learn MoreReduce Hadoop infrastructure costs with an intelligent data tiering solution using object storage for seamless application access.
Explore MoreIoT application assembly and enablement for enterprise-wide industrial data operations and information fusion. Power reliable and actionable insights for sustainable performance improvements.
Explore MoreAccelerate and scale operations application deployment with a complete IIoT data platform framework, including core, gateway, digital twins, and machine learning (ML) services.
Explore MoreToolkits that simplify industrial IoT software solutions delivery with packaged digital twins, machine learning (ML) services, and deployable ML models.
Explore MoreXaaS: Your infrastructure, only better. Get the ability to scale as needed, guaranteed SLAs, and pay-as-you-go pricing to align IT costs with your business.
Explore MoreFast and flexible cloud consumption subscription service for storage. Enjoy proven performance of pay-as-you-grow storage and agile storage services with a cloud-based self-service management console.
Explore MoreLevel up data protection quickly and easily with cloud-managed pay-as-you-go, OPEX options for hybrid environments.
Explore MoreHitachi Vantara Professional Services will help accelerate your digital infrastructure deployment, speeding your benefits and providing you the skills to adapt and optimize IT change.
Explore MoreBringing the power of cloud to thousands of customers like you, innovative converged and hyperconverged solutions that increase product release velocity, simplify cloud operations, and reduce TCO.
Explore MoreRedefine enterprise IT with best-in-class performance and availability for your most critical business applications.
Explore MoreSimplify, scale, and save with next-gen HCI appliances delivering low-latency infrastructure and advanced policy-based automation to modernize IT.
Explore MoreIncrease business agility and automation with a seamless hybrid cloud powered by VMware Cloud Foundation.
Explore MoreFlexibility, scale, and performance to make tomorrow's technology work for you today.
Explore MoreAI-driven image-based inspection automates defect detection for equipment assets to lower costs, reduce risks, and enhance worker safety.
Explore MoreComprehensive services to optimize resilience and cost for always-on business. Design, build, run, and operate workloads across private, public, hybrid, and multicloud environments.
Visit App Reliability CentersA range of options to help you reinvent, innovate, transform, and scale. Rely on our global network of experts, supported by powerful assets, platforms, and partnerships.
Explore Consulting ServicesYour digital transformation journey starts here with experts ready to help you drive innovation, superior business outcomes, and value.
See Digital Strategy ServicesRearchitect core applications to optimize resilience and scalability, and drive superior experiences and innovation from the ground-up.
Learn About App ModernizationFast track cloud transformation by moving applications and workloads using our end-to-end cloud modernization services.
Explore Cloud ModernizationBuild exceptional real-time, data-driven experiences to drive customer and brand engagement while improving growth and business value.
Visit Digital Experience Services.Engage experts to create a modern data fabric, institute governance and DataOps, improve decision making, and optimize the value of enterprise data.
Learn About Data ModernizationThe experience, analytics, frameworks, and organizational knowledge to extract superior insight and value from your data, fueling competitive advantage and business growth.
Explore AI & Insights ServicesMaximize value from SAP ERP applications with our expertise and support. Leverage data to drive insights and create innovative solutions to your toughest business challenges.
Explore SAP ERP ModernizationOptimize your Oracle applications with our expert support. Improve agility, performance, and results through better business decisions and processes.
Visit Oracle ERP ModernizationDigitize your physical operations and assets to achieve data-driven modernization and achieve next-level business outcomes and ROI through industry-tested consulting services.
Learn More About IoT ServicesStreamline IT operations, enhance performance and agility, and drive growth with managed services for application and infrastructure management.
Explore Managed ServicesAccelerate depolyments and migration for improved operational efficiency and reduced TCO, with a range of Edge to Cloud Infrastructure Services.
Explore Edge to Cloud ServicesImprove competitive advantage and control of your infrastructure and service levels with expert strategy, design, and operational services.
Visit Infrastructure ServicesDeliver superior uptime while reducing risk with a range of data migration, storage implementation, data protection, and workflow automation services .
Explore Services for StorageSimple, seamless deployment and control of your complex private, hybrid, and multicloud Kubernetes environments and associated enterprise application ecosystems.
Learn About Kubernetes ServiceFree your own people to focus on driving innovation and growth with a variety of service levels and options to proactively prevent issues or disruptions to your business.
See Customer Support ServicesSingle point of contact and VIP support for ongoing guidance, best practices, and managing feature requests. Ideal for complex data management, integration, IoT, and analytics initiatives.
Lumada & Pentaho Support ServicesFlexible, expert tiered service portfolio designed to help you save time, control costs, and accelerate responses to your unique business and technical requirements and challenges
Visit Preferred Customer ServicesA variety of options for every step in your learning journey. Get up-to-speed fast, become a product or solution expert and get the most out of your valuable investment.
Learn More About TrainingComprehensive, two-tiered program to build your expertise and advance your goals and career. Track your progress and gain recognition through professional certifications and digital badges.
Learn More About CertificationGrow your business with our simple and profitable Partner Program. Our partner-centric approach means we're here to help you succeed.
Your Next OpportunityBenefit from solutions built with top technology and cloud partners that accelerate time to value and reduce risk.
Meet our Technology AlliancesTransform your business with Hybrid Cloud Services from our ecosystem of Cloud Service Providers with as-a-Service solutions that are flexible, predictable, secure and efficient.
Meet our Cloud Service ProvidersAccelerate your digital journey and gain competitive advantage with business and IT services that transform your business.
Meet our Global System IntegratorsMaximize the value of your technology investments with services that deliver outcomes for your business.
Meet our Service Delivery PartnersFind Hitachi Vantara authorized partners who are qualified to help meet your unique business needs.
Find an Expert PartnerDevelop new opportunities and accelerate your sales with configuration tools, demos, training, incentives and more.
Login NowHitachi Vantara, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., delivers the intelligent data platforms, infrastructure systems, and digital expertise that supports more than 80% of the fortune 100. Learn how Hitachi Vantara turns businesses from data-rich to data-driven through agile digital processes, products, and experiences.
Explore CompanyHitachi Vantara, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., delivers the intelligent data platforms, infrastructure systems, and digital expertise that supports more than 80% of the fortune 100. Learn how Hitachi Vantara turns businesses from data-rich to data-driven through agile digital processes, products, and experiences.
Explore CompanyHow has the COVID-19 Pandemic impacted the role of Business and IT
CTO
as CTO… I'm sorry.
It's nice and simple.
It is nice and simple. One of our CTOs, on the team as well, managing a lot of our, cross industry, insights and analytics. So, with that gentlemen, I'd like to put out a couple of questions, too. And, um, the first one being: How has IT strategy had to change as a result of the current situation? I'll take volunteers: Who wants to answer that one first?
I say we start with Tim since he's currently operating IT.
Well, I think so. I've been in the CIO chair for just on a hundred days here at Hitachi Vantara, so it's certainly been a little bit of a baptism by fire. But, it's, overall good, I think. I mean, the first thing is I think, like most internal IT organizations, you know, the initial couple of weeks once we came into this was, was more of just react, right? Activate the business continuity plan, make sure that we kept things running so that the business could keep running, right? And I think most CIOs, you know, uh, through that … well, we are certainly well and through that, right. And we're in at the moment, I guess what I call the operate phase. But we're now starting to look ahead at, you know, that rebound phase, which is what you're talking about, Scott, about: How do we need to adapt and be ready? So, you know, one of the things that we're thinking ahead to is: Is this gonna mean more M and A activity? Because we certainly think that there's going to be some M and A opportunities out there. And therefore, how do we make sure that we've got the right playbooks and skillsets in place to build on some of the M and A activity that we're already working on at the moment. As part of our merger with Hitachi consulting, a lot of the work that we're actively doing right now is merging the infrastructure and the systems for those two companies. I think for many organizations, they're going to look at this pandemic as an opportunity to, you know, look at the valuations of potential M and A targets. There could be some attractive, acquisitions out there. So I think as an IT organization, one of the things that we're thinking about is, you know: How do we make sure we're prepared if we as an organization do more M and A? The second thing is, it has caused us to take a look at some aspects of what we had as a business continuity plan. We were pretty well established in terms of, you know, the ability to have people work remotely. You know, we're running more than 5,000 teams meetings a day across the company without any problems. VPN hasn't been a problem. But you know, things like VPN, virtual desktop — we think there are some opportunities to probably move to some more modern technologies so that, you know, if this type of thing were to happen again, we potentially are on some more modern technologies, for some of those things. So that's a couple of things that I'm thinking about as an IT organization here at Hitachi Vantara.
I think those are really good points, regardless of what organization you're at, right? The winning phrase of the day is agility. If you were agile before this occurred, you were more likely to be successful when it occurred. The less agile you were, the more painful this transition became. Right? And, and I think, the kind of by-product of that is, M and A becomes a real possibility, regardless of what side you're on, right? Whether you're the one being purchased or doing the purchasing, um, it's a really good time to kind of look at some of these, some of some of your neighbours and go: Hey, you know, we might be a really good fit together and this group's more agile or they're less agile. Maybe we bring them in and, and kind of get the best of both worlds. And then kind of second to that, right? It's a really good time to take a look at your BCP plan and say: Hey, how well did that work? What were the assumptions we made? Because we've never had to do this before, and how do we correct those assumptions going forward?
Never, never waste a crisis, right?
Politician!
I think there's some clear distinction though, sir, industry-wide, and I think it's fair to say that there are probably three big buckets of businesses that are impacted. There's the thriving bucket, right? Where they used to do well, but now they're doing much better. Like Zoom is doing much better. Like delivery services are doing much better. Like car services that are now moving from people to food, doing much better, right? So they're thriving in this world. What does that mean for their IT group? Then there is on the other side, which is the suffering side, right? Any organization that was, that required people closeness like stadiums, like movie theatres, like theme parks, right? Those are suffering because they don't exist anymore. In fact, that's where most of the furloughed employees have gone. And then there's those organizations in the middle that are, okay, they might have a degradation of revenue, but they've had to shift their business strategy. So if they're a retail or a CPG, they've had to move from in store purchasing to e-commerce purchasing. They might be selling the same amount of products. They're just selling them differently, which means it has to shift completely between how they were operating the edge, the end points and how they're operating their e-commerce site. And then of course the size of IT, right? A big banks' IT probably is perfectly fine. A small, 50% of IT is probably suffering, right? So there's a pretty dramatic sort of industry-centric change.
I think, Paul, I just want to pick up on that e-commerce thing that you mentioned for consumer products. I think it's really highlighted organizations that either were ahead of the curve or behind the curve. I was on a meeting last week with the CIO of a very, very large consumer apparel company and they have very, very minimal e-commerce capability. You know, they primarily operate through, you know, department stores or their own company stores. Very, very nice in e-commerce. Basically 95% of their revenues have apparated cause they had such a tiny e-commerce. So they're using this to say: Oh my goodness, we got to get into e-commerce and really ramp up our IT spending to really build out that capability. So I think it's giving some of us that aha moment about, you know, problems or maybe weaknesses in the business model that potentially drive, you know, a reinvestment or a change in investment of IT spend to different areas, right?
That's a massive project spend. Right? 60% of your projects is from the line of business. Well, that's a potentially a flip. Sorry. I interrupted you.
No, no. And I think when we look at it, too, right, we can start to identify companies that, that kind of sit more in that middle bucket where the whole industry isn't thriving, but rather they're kind of on the bubble. And look to examples — you see GameStop as an example, right? GameStop is not doing well. Why? Well, they made no pivot, no change whatsoever versus Best Buy, which, on the other hand, has sold out of every game console, every webcam, every keyboard, every mouse and every monitor that they had in the store. And within 48 hours or 72 hours, right? They had switched to a reduction in staff to keep people, the number of people down in the store. And within a week they had transitioned to a completely new delivery model. No more going in the store. The employees carried everything out to your car. I happened to live three miles from a best buy. It worked extremely well. And so they were able to provide a continuity of service that enabled them and allowed them to continue at least creating revenue. I have no idea what the numbers look like comparatively, but they were able to at least continue to create revenue, right? We look at Home Depot versus Lowe's, the two big box home repair stores here in the States. Home Depot started limiting the number of people in the store. They cancelled their spring black Friday sale, which is what they call the sale before the Easter weekend when people start planting and doing home improvement projects. Whereas Lowe's did not. Lowe's did neither of those things. Home Depot has been doing well. Lowe's has been doing well, too, but they're facing an employee walkout. Their employee satisfaction is at an all-time low and there's talk of a global walkout. They haven't kept their promises, et cetera, et cetera, right? So how do you kind of balance those things and what are the causes for those? And I think a lot of it really comes back to that, that that very first topic, right? Agility. If you're able to be agile, you can make a pivot like a Best Buy. But if you, if your spending was effectively nonexistent in IT and you did the bare minimum necessary to check a box, you ended up in a situation like, like GameStop where people are not coming into stores and I think they just announced they're closing a couple of hundred more stores.
Yeah. Not surprised. When they could have maybe provided a delivery service and cleared the shelves, right? Considering what they provide. There's so many people wanting to buy in all the consoles up at Best Buy at the same time. So to pivot on that conversation from agility that, that Howard just mentioned, a lot of companies are trying to be agile right now. And one of the first things they've looked to is things like Zoom that we're using here. How do I get my people connected online and how do I get them up and running from home quickly? Because we've had to move entirely to work from home world. In that, in that light, data protection, privacy, things like GDPR and CCPA and other regulatory compliance requirements don't stop because there's a global pandemic: HIPAA, PII data, other things have to be considered. So let's talk a bit about that. How do we, how do we then address data protection and privacy in this distributed homebound world we now face — where I've got thousands of endpoints instead of a single building perhaps or a data center in a couple of buildings to maintain. Tim, let's start with you again.
Sure. So our CISO, our chief information security officer, he, you know, very, very early on when we sort of knew this was probably heading this way, he said: Tim, I guarantee we're going to see an increase in phishing attacks. You know, all these types of actors come out of the woodwork and this is a great opportunity to try and exploit, you know, uncertainty or confusion. So we, one of the first things we did was ran a couple of simulated phishing campaigns. We, run them periodically through the year and, you know, these are education, right? We're not there to catch people, but you know, when we catch someone, it helps them understand: Oh, you know, I shouldn't have clicked on that link. That was probably a not a good thing to do. So we immediately ran a couple of the simulated phishing attacks. One of them was like a fake covert news site. It looked like it had come from Reuters. I mean, very, very authentic. We had a huge click-through rate on that thing. Right. Which just indicated that people were sort of, you know, like hungry for news. And this was very early on in this whole thing. So that was one of the things that I think we did first was we knew this would be there. That was really just to make sure that, you know, employees thought through the types of attacks that could be coming in. But then, it's now: Okay, have we got our data and is our infrastructure secure? With all these people now working from home, you know, some organizations, I've heard some real problems, stories for organizations that have these huge customer service organizations. You know, using lots of big outsource vendors in the Philippines in different places:
All of a sudden you've got two or 3000 contractors sitting in their apartments somewhere and you know, they're dealing with customer data. They're dealing with customer financial data, PII, data, healthcare data. It's a real problem, right? Because I don't think a lot of organizations thought we might have a localized issue where, you know, we have to shut down a site in the Philippines or we shut down a site somewhere in India or somewhere, but no one's grappled with this. Shut down the entire world. Send everyone home. I think there are a lot of organizations out there, especially in financial services and healthcare, that are probably having to rethink this whole thing about data privacy, data governance and data protection.
And you bring up a good point on outsourcing, right? Outsourcing firms work like gymnasiums: Everyone signs up on January 1st, but not everyone comes on January 2nd, right? And so it works because I can have 60 times the load knowing that the downtime is filled by the next customer and the next customer, the next customer, the next customer when everyone is at home. And I can't go into the branch and talk to my banker. I can't go into the doctor's office, I can't, you know, do these things and all of that load increases. And now everybody has questions. All that shifts to customer service, right? So not only do I have all of those people at home, but now we have all of those people answering five times, 10 times the phone load, and they're outsourced. They don't have the same care and concern for your customers that you do. And it's not their reputational risk when call times in a pandemic go from two minutes to 280 minutes.
Yeah, I think it's a great example. In fact, this is one of those unique panels where the four of us work for Hitachi, but the vast majority of all four of our careers has been operating IT versus selling it. So I think we all have shared this pain and I think it's fair to say that, in this particular world, ITSM becomes foremost capability versus the side… the side effect before, right? Service desk was something you employed, but now it's the first thing you think of because now you have, you know, 5,000 workforce out in the field. The conversations I think we've had and even that we've had internally has been this sort of federation requirement of the pandemic, which has required sort of three buckets of considerations. Bucket number one is: How do I manage human capability, right? Whether it's creativity or collaboration. Now I have technology for that and sometimes I have too many of those technologies for that. What do I use Zoom for or do I use Teams for what I use SharePoint for? And there's a pretty big and distinct difference between collaborating and creating, right? It's much easier to create in a room on a whiteboard and start from scratch. Much more difficult to do that in Zoom. Right? So how do we enable that world? That's sort of bucket number one. But bucket number two is resiliency, right? To say it's easy to think about my data centers and my networks and my offices because it's in a controlled setting, a physically controlled setting. But now I'm not concerned about my offices because nobody's at my offices. Therefore, my end points become far more important than my central point. And what does that mean for availability of data, accessibility of applications, making sure that the experience is the same? And then of course, security as we just talked about. And some of that security is social engineering security as the example came up. Or, it's simple security as in: I have to make sure — simple resiliency in terms of making sure that the end point has the appropriate bandwidth to get to the data that I need to get it to. And is that appropriate bandwidth secure enough or do I have to start paying for things like a modem and a firewall and Wi-Fi within the individual locations, because I need to make sure they're secure? So it's falling into those buckets — it was severely changed how IT is operating in a near real time.
Yeah, I think you bring up a good point there, Paul. I mean, we've seen it, I've even done it myself. We've had to: We've all come up and requested more bandwidth from our providers.
Right.
Companies have and users have. And the providers are kind of at their limits, right? They weren't prepared to, to increase their bandwidth available by five times overnight. I think some of you probably run into the same kind of an issue.
What sales is really happy with: the increase. Right. I've got colleagues and customers, right, of telcos, and their sales is thrilled. Operations is pulling their hair out because of that exact issue, right? And the telecom is a really interesting one because they've had two changes. The first is: Customers are demanding bandwidth at a rate they not only can't provision, but simply don't have. When you're a Comcast or a Centrelink and you don't have, or a Verizon or AT&T, it's not limited just to those two. And you simply don't have the bandwidth between your core to provision and deal with the load that that's demanded from your customers. That's a big problem. And then the other thing is when we looked at internet utilization: It kind of went like this and by about 8:00 p.m. it had reached peak and it stayed at peak till about 11, and then dipped back down for the next day. So it's that, that drive started at about 6:00 p.m. Right. People got home from work, they kind of turned the TV on. They got together as a family. They started watching 17 different streaming services for the 17 people in the house. The problem is now with everybody home, it's gone like this: 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. is now the peak, right? Because all everybody is streaming on one screen while they do their work on another screen because there's no human interaction. So it provides us the kind of noise that we're, that we're used to. And so telecoms are in this kind of like they're feasting and famining at the same time. And it's a really interesting kind of side effect, right? When we look at any of the companies that are in that, that thrive bucket, sales are having a great day. The operations folks, whoever, now have to deal with all of those challenges.
Scott, I'd be interested in hearing stories about what happens when we returned to normal, if we ever to return to normal. How does, how does IT, what does IT look like in December? How is it? How was your, like Tim, how is your team changed in December, you think? More or less indifferent? Are they doing different things?
I absolutely think it's going to be different things Paul. Because, I think, you know, fundamentally there are going to be some changes, regardless of what industry or what business you're in. The projects that we were working on, you know, two months ago and the projects that we thought were probably the business-driven projects for this year — they're all up for review now, right? Because things are going to be different in our business. They're going to be different in any organization's business. I really think, and it comes back, I think, how that agility thing is, you know. I've got to make sure that my team can switch effectively from a portfolio of projects that we're working on now, and be able to pivot quickly to work on potentially a new portfolio. Because I think there will be a different portfolio of projects that we need to work on. So that from an application side, I think, that will be a change. And then as I said, we're taking this opportunity to relook at, even though all in all, our business continuity plan went really, really well. Touch on wood. Awkward. But there are some things that we sort of think: Well, we probably need to rethink that, right? So, for example, we've got a little over a thousand employees in Vietnam. Most of them had desktops, and getting that out of the office to people's homes in Ho Chi Minh City was tough, right? We just never thought we'd have to shut down that whole office. So we're sort of relooking at some of those little learnings, to readjust the business plan. But I think the biggest challenge for a lot of the ITOs is going to be: How do you trend your application portfolio? And also these things that I highlighted earlier, about: Oh, maybe we do have some data privacy or data security issues with having all these people all of a sudden working from home. Like they're probably real issues that need to be addressed, right? And now need to be thought through.
Right. It's quite possible you don't even see, you see the events now, but you don't see the correlation for months from now.
So one of the things that I think is interesting, as Gartner did a survey of CFOs and of the CFOs that responded, 74% said they plan on continuing work from home after this crisis is over. They do not want to return back to completely back to everybody on-premises. And, it ranges anywhere from 5% up to greater than 50%. So if we just say 10% and we just say the U.S., anybody want to take a guess in what the cost savings in real estate costs for business alone will be? And I'll give you a couple of, I'll give you a couple of pieces of information. The current statistics are: The average office requires 180 to 250 square feet per employee per month, and it's about $2 per employee per month, right? So that works out to about $4,800 a year on average for real estate costs for the employees. Anyone want to take a guess at what it just a 10% reduction in that cost would be to the U.S. economy?
No, can't.
It's $75 billion. 74 billion, $880 million in just the reduction in real estate costs to businesses by keeping 10% of employees home.
You're telling me I should short my rates at the moment now.
Organizations like Regis are going to win.
Yeah. So, I mean, that is kind of the big takeaway from all of this: The things that have been exposed are things that I don't think anyone ever would have expected, right? Who are your best remote workers in reality? Task workers, right? Your task workers hands down are your best remote workers because a task comes in, they process the tasks, they move to the next task, they process the texts, they move the next to the next text, right? They require in reality the least amount of oversight. And one of the things that I think is interesting is there is the easiest [area] to measure via KPI. It's also a really good time to start looking at those teams and going: What are the managers, who are the leaders that are complaining that those people are not in the office, that they're not on Zoom all the time, that they're not constantly checking in and yet the KPIs aren't dropping. That probably tells you have some micromanagers you probably have some leaders that need a little mentoring. Right? And then those of us that are knowledge workers, right? We find that while traditionally we thought they were the best work at home, they're the most independent. They can kind of do their own thing. They also require the most support from other people. Task workers kind of don't. I do my task or my part of the workflow and I move on. And so I think we're going to see a flip there. I think also we kind of prioritize the performance kind of above everything else. Even I would say more than availability. Like we wanted the application to be available, but it had to be not just available, but it had to be massively performant. And I think what we're also able to see now is availability as a 10-to-one value over performance, especially when I can't control the network. Right? And people are more lenient, right? They know that at home it's likely going to be slower if they just make that conclusion to ask come to the office where they expect subsecond response time for something that clearly we have no control over it.
Yeah. Well we, you know, we closed our books, uh, you know, our fiscal year just ended a couple of weeks ago. We closed the books with the entire CFO and controllership organization, not in the office. And I know that there was some nervousness about performance and that type of thing, but it was fine. We got through without any problem. But, you know, again, a little concern about people having all of this information, now, at their home. So, we told people, you know, just be careful. Don't be plugging your kid's USB drive into your laptop that they just brought home from school or something. Right. You never know what might be on there. But, um, yeah, I agree on the application performance is going to be, you know, people are expecting that that is the more important thing now that they're at home.
They're also going to expect a significant increase in application agility. So just as an example, from a consumer perspective, they just have witnessed, you know, local pizza shops magically create a new mobile: They now magically can create deliveries and you can pre-order and you have curb-side check-in. You can go to Starbucks — take the drinks right to your car, which they didn't have before. And it took them days and weeks to create those features and functions. Well, now they expect the in enterprise application that they have that kind of agility.
Yeah. You're not clawing those features back, regardless. And so there's, there's kind of that dichotomy again, right? The first is, business is not gonna be able to go back to the way that it was. They're not just gonna be able to turn off all of these features and not see some whiplash from it. Right? Like I used Best Buy, I'll continue that. I don't really want to go in the store anymore guys. You showed me you could bring it to my car. I now expect you to bring it to my car. Right. You also showed that you could turn that feature on in two weeks, yet my grocery store can't get it. Can't get it accomplished at all. Right. So, I mean, I think business needs to change and accept that some portion of the, of the continuing world will need to have these features. But also, I think we're going to look at IT and say the enterprise applications that you've been delivering, you probably need to also be able to deliver not only with that agility, but with those kinds of feature sets.
Yeah, Agreed. I mean, we're looking at some major changes. We've talked about a lot of the different, priorities being changed and things like that here. How does that redefine mission critical? We just mentioned the mobile app capability. Maybe Best Buy should start selling groceries. I don't know. But yeah, like some lettuce with my wireless router please. We need to have these capabilities to be more agile, to be faster. If we can do this today, why didn't we do it before? Maybe it wasn't being in budgets and priorities or maybe it was just committees. But going forward, how do we, how do we prioritize what now is defined as mission critical from a business perspective as things have been kind of flipped on their head?
I think, for most organizations, we've talked about a few that are doing just fine during this time, right? The streaming services, the food delivery, the gaming, right? And, you know, there are other organizations that are really hurting. So I think, you know, focus on: How do you rebound revenue as quickly as possible? How do you potentially get some more technology in your hands of your sales organizations so that they can rebound quickly and be agile? Right? So, for example, we're looking at deploying one of the LinkedIn, sales products more broadly in the sales organization, to help them with their prospecting and their lead generation because they can't get on a plane and they can't get out and do that business-to-business selling that many, many organizations rely on. So I think there are some new technologies like that. Organizations are going to have to deploy so that they can get that revenue rebounding as quickly as possible.
So I think there are kind of four new rules of IT, right? And I think, ultimately, [that] the business needs to accept these rules, and kind of what comes along with it. The first is agility everything, right? And that's kind of a business needs to become a business rule, but it's everything from DevOps to procurement processes, approval processes, everything, right? The companies that were agile during this are the ones that are gonna come out of it the best. I would say the second is mobile everything: Assume everyone is out of office and able to work out of office and able to operate out of office. And so make sure that your applications extend not only to mobility being out of the office, right, and not requiring a connection back or a machine in the data center, but also those different experiences that mobile allows. Security is everywhere. No longer just everything. We've always thought about it kind of as everything. But we went from 500 end points that had to be secured to 10,000 end points that had to be secured, right? And so security doesn't just need to be by design, but it also needs to be everywhere. And then I would say the last is digital everything, right? You must have a reliable online shopping cart. If it is an online, it doesn't exist. And I think that's kind of the future of IT and the future of business. I think that which is IT? and which is business? is a little grey, right? Even if IT owns it, I think business needs to support it. But I would say that's kind of the future to narrow it down to just four things. Not that they're small things.
And if I'd added dimension just to Howard's four there, I would say that consumption needs to change. Okay. Right. We're used to project-based consumption. You buy infrastructure as part of a project to create a future function on application. We simply can't do that anymore. We don't, we're not at the data center. We now have to look at a much further forecasting of our consumption of our infrastructure and sort of acquire that beforehand. And then partnerships. Partnerships can't be data center centric. They have to be edge centric in many ways. Even though it's a weird to say, right? It's about saying if I need to expand my capability at the edge, I need to have partners that need to be able to get out there. If I need just kind of like our CSNs team, right. I need people at the edge to help with the edge. It can't always centralize.
Yeah. Spot on. And we've seen it a lot of that recently, enabling the edges is kind of the hard right. We're running out of a parts we can ship: cameras and microphones and things to enable the workforce at home. Monitors are flying off the shelves. We saw a big edge gap in the last few weeks. So, I think that's going to change expectations going forward. And with that, I'll ask one last question and that is: How do we instill in our teams the mindset of "let's get it done and get it done now," to get more agile as organizations from an operational standpoint, because we've all had to be creative lately. But how do we, how do we get that programmatized, if you will, moving forward.
Hi, I'm encouraging my team to take advantage. Some of them have a little bit of extra time in the day and they're not dealing with crazy communities. This is the time to skill up and trying, right? There's so much free training that's available out there now across the board. Most of the big technology conferences are moving online. ServiceNow, for example. The whole thing is online. The whole thing is free. So, you know, I've got people in my organization in Poland and India that never would have had the opportunity to participate in some of these conferences. They can now do it from their desktop for free. So I'm really encouraging folks to think about this, you know, try and use a little bit of this time, learn some new stuff. Take advantage of all this free stuff that's out there so that when we do rebound, you know, you've picked up maybe some new skills.
So I would say you've either figured it out or you figured out who's the barrier, right? We are sitting in an all-hands-on-deck world today, right now. Right? Even if it's slowing, right? Even if we're kind of coming back to business, IT, as normal — in which we spend a lot of our time thinking about the future. We just went through the toughest, tightest, longest period of all hands on deck that's ever happened. And we did it. All of us as a world. If you as a leader haven't looked at your team to determine where the weak links are in all hands on deck, you're the problem. Very literally. Right? And I don't care if that's, you have a bunch of individual contributors that work for you or you're the CIO, right? It's a really good time to look at everybody in your organization and do two things. One, are the people in leadership actually leading or are they just bossing? You do this, you do this, you do this, and I'm out — is a boss without a doubt. Right? Um, why can't you be on the 47 meetings I have set? Probably a boss. And then who were the people that you never thought were leaders that suddenly stepped up during all hands on deck and people naturally followed them. So, those are your leaders, right? So, cut the first group, use the second group to backfill the first group. You'll come out of it 10 times stronger than anything else could have possibly made you, because it's only during a crisis that you find out where a true leader is.
I agree. It's this internally driven leadership that has surfaced that we didn't know before and back because we can't be as collaborative as we used to be and we can't do consensus decisions the way we used to do it before. Now you make your own decision. Now you create your own opportunity. Now you create things you've never — you've waited for others to create before. And now you're seeing a whole bunch of interesting things come to the surface, to which we can actually say drive to a conclusion. It's these people that are creating the agile features and functions and availability that we didn't have before.
Yep. Yeah. Well said. Thank you Paul. With that, I think we'll wrap up for today, but I appreciate everyone's time. Thank you gentlemen. We'll convene again soon to continue this and dig a bit deeper into how IT can act and react during this time and help reinforce the business's goals, and help some companies survive and others to thrive. Thank you again and have a good afternoon. Stay safe.
Read this datasheet to see how network attached storage (NAS) system software, included with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform N series (VSP N series) and Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) systems, provides advanced cloud integration and intelligent tiering.
LEARN MOREGartner, Inc. recognized Hitachi as a "Visionary" in its 2019 Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT platforms based on its evaluation of Hitachi's Lumada software.
LEARN MORELearn about Global Storage Virtualization and integration with the Virtual Storage Platform family series.
LEARN MORE
Thank you. We will contact you shortly.
Note: Since you opted to receive updates about solutions and news from us, you will receive an email shortly where you need to confirm your data via clicking on the link. Only after positive confirmation you are registered with us.
If you are already subscribed with us you will not receive any email from us where you need to confirm your data.
Explore more about us:
To Talk to a Representative,
Call 1.678.403.3035
Hitachi Data Systems, Pentaho and Hitachi Insight Group have merged into one company: Hitachi Vantara.
The result? More data-driven solutions and innovation from the partner you can trust.
REAN Cloud is now a part of Hitachi Vantara.
The result? Robust data-driven solutions and innovation, with industry-leading expertise in cloud migration and modernization.
Waterline Data is now Lumada Data Catalog, provided by Hitachi Vantara. Lumada Data Catalog, available stand-alone, is now part of the Lumada Data Services portfolio.
This site uses cookies from Hitachi and third parties for our own business purposes and to personalize your experience. By using this site, you agree to the use of cookies. For more information, visit Hitachi Cookies Policy.
Hello,
Let me know how I can help you today.
Chat with our sales experts or call us at 1-678-403-3035.