ThinkOn, Spinmaster and Accident Exchange Trust Hitachi Content Platform for Their Most Critical Data

HCP Reaches $1B in Revenue and Fuels Customers’ Digital Transformations Across a Wide Range of Use Cases and Industries

SANTA CLARA, CA (March 7, 2017) — Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501), today announced that the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) portfolio has generated $1 billion in revenue for HDS. The portfolio is seeing a significant increase in new customers, evolving use cases and industry recognition. In fact, customers such as ThinkOn, Spinmaster and Accident Exchange entrust the Hitachi Content Platform portfolio with their most critical data because of HCP’s robust data governance, compliance and intelligent management capabilities.

"Customers are using Hitachi Content Platform to enable their digital transformation journey. Our objective has always been to help customers modernize traditional IT environments as a first step, with the ultimate goal of providing a foundational solution to allow them to extract value by using their data in new and interesting ways," said Peter Sjoberg, chief technology officer, cloud and mobility for Hitachi Data Systems.

While HDS’ solutions are not limited to organizations in highly regulated industries such as finance, banking and healthcare, the company is at the forefront of tackling many modern and emerging data challenges, including stringent policies around data management, compliance and a growing swell of government regulations. At the same time, customer data must be more mobile than ever and ready for analysis to drive business forward. Hitachi Content Platform tackles these challenges, arming companies with the tools they need for their digital transformation journey.

Hitachi Content Platform delivers unique value to customers in that it offers a tightly integrated ecosystem of solutions surrounding the object storage platform to enable customers greater business value and benefits. Data has become the lifeblood of every organization in every industry, whether it is employee data, customer information, internal communications, intellectual property, machine data or research. The ability to ensure control, visibility, governance, collaboration, accessibility and analysis of this vital data is paramount.

The following three customer success stories highlight the flexibility and value the HCP portfolio delivers to customers by solving larger organizational challenges with a holistic solution oriented approach.

• ThinkOn
  ThinkOn, a wholesale provider of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), needed to build a set of service offerings to improve productivity, deliver insights and maintain governance. After implementing HCP object storage, ThinkOn launched several pay-as-you-go services that help companies protect their critical data assets and optimize their application infrastructure costs. HCP and its integrated cloud gateway, Hitachi Data Ingestor, helped them achieve greater than expected performance, simplify storage provisioning and improve storage utilization efficiencies. “When you start up with any new service, you try your best to plan for all of the expected benefits as well as for risks. With HCP, what we found is that we're getting much better performance out of the infrastructure than what we expected or planned for. This has given us a lot more flexibility than we originally anticipated with respect to supporting customer owned assets as well as our own infrastructure,” said Craig McLellan, CEO, ThinkOn.


• Spinmaster
  Spinmaster, the fourth largest toy company in the world, chose the HCP portfolio, displacing IBM^® and NetApp as their default storage providers for file and content. The HCP portfolio replaced a host of various file sync and share tools on user devices with a common, corporate approved solution. “Spinmaster deployed Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) to unify and manage unstructured data and simplify backup tasks. Using Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) and Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere to accelerate productivity, HCP delivers business insights and governance from any cloud, device or location, which was critical in our decision to go with Hitachi Data Systems,” said Pravine Balkaran, Head of Global IT.


• Accident Exchange
  “With HCP as its primary object storage, credit hire and insurance services company, Accident Exchange (part of the AIS Group), has simplified data management and reduced the pain of audits and the risks of ever-changing regulatory requirements. By using the HCP portfolio they have also been able to cut storage growth, reduce backup substantially and reduce their total cost of ownership for data storage. Our industry is constantly under the threat of audit and is subject to ever changing and evolving regulatory demands. With Hitachi Content Platform, we have eliminated inefficient silos and can easily view and govern hundreds of millions of pieces of data, staying ahead of those requirements. HCP allows us to sleep better at night. With HCP as our object store, we empower our business to dictate our continuous application development, leading the way to digital transformation without being constrained by data formats and compliance worries, something no other storage technology could have delivered,” said Ray Ford, CTO, AIS Group.

Recently, Hitachi Data Systems won Best Information Governance Company 2016 at The Information Governance Conference 2016, reaffirming Hitachi Content Platform’s ability to solve modern data challenges. HCP has deployed 500 petabytes of capacity, generated $1 billion in revenue and is used by four out of five of the largest banks in the world. Additionally, there has been an average of 1000% year-on-year growth of HCP software since 2010.

About the Hitachi Content Platform Portfolio
The Hitachi Content Platform portfolio is the only offering that allows organizations to bring together object storage, file sync and share, cloud storage gateways, and sophisticated search and analytics to create a tightly integrated, simple and smart cloud storage solution. HCP provides massive scale, multiple storage tiers, powerful security, cloud capabilities, multitenancy and configurable attributes for each tenant, all backed by legendary Hitachi reliability. Designed to preserve data for long durations, HCP carries built-in data protection mechanisms and is designed to fluently evolve as storage technologies change. Furthermore, HCP is able to address a wide range of challenges through a thriving community of third-party software partners as well as traditional and cloud storage protocols. HCP eliminates the need to maintain separate systems for each workload and bridges the gap between traditional, mode-1 applications and modern, mode-2 operations. Customers enjoy faster time to value and service providers accelerate time to market by eliminating the hassles of do-it-yourself integration.

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About Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., offers an integrated portfolio of services and solutions that enable digital transformation through enhanced data management, governance, mobility and analytics. We help global organizations open new revenue streams, increase efficiencies, improve customer experience and ensure rapid time to market in the digital age. Only Hitachi Data Systems powers the digital enterprise by integrating the best information technology and operational technology from across the Hitachi family of companies. We combine this experience with Hitachi expertise in the internet of things to deliver the exceptional insights business and society need to transform and thrive. Visit us at HDS.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.
Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, delivers innovations that answer society's challenges with our talented team and proven experience in global markets. The company's consolidated revenues for fiscal 2014 (ended March 31, 2015) totaled 9,761 billion yen ($81.3 billion). Hitachi is focusing more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes power & infrastructure systems, information & telecommunication systems, construction machinery, high functional materials & components, automotive systems, healthcare and others. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

Company Contact:
Stefani Finch
Hitachi Data Systems
+1 408-499-7349

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