Exclusive Interview: Anupam Nagar, Sr Director, India Alliances and Channels, Hitachi Vantara

In a candid interaction with DQ Channels, Anupam Nagar, Sr Director, India Alliances and Channels shared the deep insights of Go to Market, Channel partner programs and partner-centric approach for Hitachi Vantara India.

What are the GTM and Channel strategies of Hitachi Vantara?

At Hitachi Vantara we are extremely proud of our close alignment with our key partners to bring our data ops advantage to our customers. We have a strong and growing ecosystem of partners in India who can take our solutions, integrate them with their IP and Services and accelerate the rollout of IT and IoT solutions locally and support our government’s vision of digitally empowered citizens. Hitachi-Vantara’s market focus is helping customers to improve their business outcomes with innovative technology solutions that will not only change the way companies operate, but also how the world works. The company’s mission is that its customers begin to “own” their data and learn how to maximize their analytical capabilities to improve their business models. Hitachi-Vantara’s solutions give customers the keys to unlocking the value of what’s happening within their enterprise.

We have highly structured academy-led training courses and certification levels in Hitachi Certified Professional Program for our Partners. The Channel strategy is aimed at arming our partners to demonstrate incremental value to our customers via Data Stairway to Value.

The Data Stairway to Value aligns the investments to deliver the return our customers are looking for from our products and solutions. It reinforces the integrated nature of all the investments, and it is a system that pays off at each level. This framework function in four steps: Store, Enrich, Activate & Monetize.

1. STORE: Store and protect the data at the lowest cost and right service levels across traditional and private/public/multi/hybrid cloud solutions. With an agile data infrastructure that optimizes the storage, management, and protection of the information assets while optimizing the service levels, one can enable innovation across the enterprise
2. ENRICH: Use metadata and analytic insights to generate new “context” that makes data more intelligent. Our customers can link this data to discover conceptual relationships that are otherwise invisible and apply those insights to support the innovations that drive value for the business
3. ACTIVATE: Integrate and orchestrate data assets and use analytics to generate actionable insights for every interaction. In this step, our customers can discover, integrate and orchestrate data to drive business value, either by boosting productivity or creating new revenue opportunities. Activating their data enables them to apply advanced analytics that generates actionable insights for every enterprise interaction and application
4. MONETIZE: Deliver outcomes that capture the economic value of all data inside company/enterprise and beyond. Monetizing data is about taking its latent value and connecting that value to an entirely new business opportunity and generate new sources of revenue and allow mature businesses to diversify for growth.

As Hitachi Vantara continues its transformation to help customers maximize the value of their data, the company has invested significantly in its partner business as a critical component for growth.  We provide our partners with the best-in-class certification program, which strengthens their professional capabilities to meet market needs and reach their business goals. We conduct periodical training for partners and regularly update them on our products and solutions through regular webinars. Also, we organize annual partner events for our partners to interact with our executives face-to-face and discuss the latest industry trends and the ever-changing market needs. The last India CIO & Partner Summit was successfully held in Sri Lanka in February.

 What are the recent developments/initiatives in Hitachi Vantara’s Channel Partner program?

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. The new program is based on how to drive solutions, not products. Everything that has been built now is about the solution and the joint business planning process that focuses on core initiatives, solutions, a route to market and where our partners want to go.

The new Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure build on our global Cisco partnership, paving the way for expanding our collaboration into new areas and the new Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) that combines the companies’ technologies including Hitachi’s storage and Cisco’s compute and networking.

Introduced in September 2018, Hitachi VSP PRO semi-customizable configurations are a prime example of how the company is delivering on its promises to simplify and accelerate sales cycles for partners. Created expressly for the partner community, Hitachi VSP PRO solutions allow partners to quickly and easily quote small, medium, large and extra-large systems with an automated, self-service sales model that reduces the process from several hours to a matter of minutes.

The key differentiator would be Hitachi Vantara’s innovative models of selling to customers via these focused partners. We will continue to collaborate with our partners to penetrate newer markets and increase our market share.

What are the Verticals/technologies that Channel Partners should focus to grow their business?

Our vision is to create a self-sustaining, value selling and profitable ecosystem of partners which forms the crux of our channel strategy in India. One of our key objectives is to bring about more clarity on partner roles by outlining clear expectations.

The increased storage, analytics, smart spaces solutions and cloud-migration demand from segments like Public Sector, Technical Services, and BFSI has driven the growth of all our solutions in India. As part of their technology refresh and capacity expansion, modernization initiatives and investments in emerging technologies continuously drive the incremental growth.

Highlight the potential business impact for Channel Partners as well as distributors by partnering with Hitachi Vantara.

By 2020, an estimated 50 billion physical objects will be consuming, generating and communicating data with the greatest potential to make a big impact on businesses, society and the world at large. The digital transformation of businesses, the advent of 3rd platform technologies and rapid digitization of services has led to a significant increase in the creation and consumption of data.

Hitachi Vantara provides a unique data ops advantage to our partners in Storing, Enriching, Activating and Monetizing this massively increasing data for their customers. Hitachi Vantara will continue to innovate and deliver core data services, data infrastructure and content delivered “as-­a-­Service”. We’re moving away from a “speeds and feeds” metric to focus on what matters: business outcomes.

Our partner ecosystem is highly critical to our success. As we look to broaden our ecosystem expertise and deepen our cloud, analytics, and IoT services and offerings, we will continue to expand our solution-capable partner ecosystem to accelerate co-creation and innovation and to help our customers fully leverage their data to drive extraordinary outcomes.

Elaborate the increasing importance of partners in today’s fast-paced, highly competitive marketplace; continued growth among the large Indian SI partners due to alignment with strategic focus areas.

Hitachi Vantara partners with some of the world’s leading Consulting, Systems Integration, and Managed Services providers. Together with our GSI partners, we enable our customers to derive the business and technology value needed to compete in today's market by leveraging unique solutions to meet their biggest business challenges.