How Hitachi Vantara is powering India’s partner-led data infrastructure

As India’s data economy accelerates, driven by digital transformation, hybrid cloud adoption, and AI-led workloads, the role of infrastructure vendors is being redefined. Storage and compute are no longer transactional assets; they are strategic foundations for resilience, compliance, and long-term scalability.

At the centre of this shift is Darsshan Somaiya, Head of Strategic Partners & Alliances for India and SAARC at Hitachi Vantara. In a wide-ranging conversation, Somaiya explains why Hitachi Vantara has built its India growth almost entirely on deep, outcome-driven partnerships, and why the next phase of enterprise technology will be led by data platforms, not devices.

A Journey Anchored in Solutions, Not Transactions

Somaiya has spent over five and a half years with Hitachi Vantara, joining the organisation in mid-2020, at the height of the pandemic. The timing proved pivotal.

“When I joined, we saw a massive explosion of data in India. Hitachi Vantara stood strong with on-prem, co-hosted, and hybrid cloud solutions at a time when customers needed certainty and resilience,” he says.

Having spent more than a decade earlier in a broad-based technology environment, Somaiya says the transition to a solution-specific, outcome-focused organisation fundamentally changed how he viewed enterprise infrastructure.

“Hitachi Vantara specialises in data infrastructure. We are not about selling boxes, we are about ensuring data availability, reliability, and scalability.”

That focus has paid off for the organisation.

Why 100% Partner-Led Is a Strategic Advantage

Hitachi Vantara conducts 100% of its India business through partners, but with a highly selective approach.

“We don’t believe in fulfilment partners. For us, partners must be strategic, trusted, and profitable.” 

Rather than scaling breadth, the company works closely with 30–35 focused partners across India and SAARC. These partners are deeply integrated across sales, pre-sales, post-sales, support, and marketing.

“If partners find trust across all these functions and see profitability, that’s where long-term success is built.”

The result is a partner ecosystem where nearly 95–98% of partners operate as strategic advisors, not transactional resellers.

From Data Explosion to AI Outcomes

As enterprises rethink architecture for AI, their strategy is clear that infrastructure readiness starts long before GPUs or models.

“Good data is good AI. If the data is junk, the outcomes will also be junk,” he says plainly.

Hitachi Vantara works with partners to help customers evolve their data maturity, starting from data stores, progressing to data marts, and eventually to data lakes for large conglomerates and regulated industries.

In this model, Hitachi Vantara does not compete with GPU-centric vendors. Instead, it positions itself as the data foundation on which AI innovation runs.

“We support partners in building strong data platforms, and then the AI developers, working on LLMs or SLMs, decide on top of that infrastructure.”

Strategic alliances with NVIDIA ecosystems, high-performance networking vendors, and parallel file systems such as HammerSpace, WEKA, and others enable partners to deliver outcome-based AI architectures, not just hardware stacks.

Beyond Certifications: What Partners Must Really Build

For Somaiya, certifications alone are no longer sufficient in an AI-driven, hybrid world.

“It’s not about trading storage or selling disks. Our solutions don’t even start in the low-cost segments,” he notes.

Instead, Hitachi Vantara expects partners to invest in strong pre-sales engineering, solution sizing, and application-aware design. Understanding IOPS, throughput, transaction patterns, and workload behaviour is non-negotiable, especially in regulated sectors such as BFSI, capital markets, and government.

Cyber resilience is equally critical. Somaiya highlights Hitachi Vantara’s alliances with Commvault, Veeam, and Cohesity, enabling customers to recover from cyber incidents in hours, not days.

“We are proud that in many cases, customers can get their data back within one to four hours.” 

Sustainability as a Core Infrastructure Metric

Energy efficiency and sustainability are no longer peripheral concerns. According to Somaiya, Hitachi Vantara is significantly ahead of the curve.

“We are among the highest-rated vendors globally when it comes to Energy Star certifications.”

Beyond power efficiency, Hitachi Vantara focuses on smaller hardware footprints, reduced cooling requirements, and lower raw-material carbon impact. Somaiya estimates that Hitachi’s solutions deliver 30–35% lower CO₂ footprint compared to industry averages.

Partners are trained through the Partner Technical Ambassador Club (PTAC), where pre-sales engineers become sustainability champions, helping customers align performance, compliance, and ESG goals.

Tier-2 and Tier-3 India: Proof, Not Pitch

Contrary to outdated perceptions, Somaiya believes India’s tier-2 and tier-3 cities are already enterprise-ready.

“Partners in cities like Surat, Baroda, Coimbatore, and Pune are running world-class proof-of-concept labs,” he says.

Hitachi Vantara has helped set up 11 demo centres in India, with eight located in class-B cities. These centres enable real-world demonstrations of storage virtualisation and non-disruptive migration, critical for mid-market and large enterprises alike.

“You have companies in these cities doing Rs. 4,000–5,000 crore turnover. They demand enterprise-grade infrastructure,” Somaiya notes.

Virtualisation: The Core Differentiator

At the heart of Hitachi Vantara’s value proposition is storage virtualisation.

Somaiya explains it simply: Hitachi Vantara can virtualise legacy infrastructure from other OEMs, take control of their disks and controllers, and enable non-disruptive migration, even during live operations.

He cites large-scale Indian examples where mission-critical environments were migrated without downtime, reinforcing why virtualisation remains central to Hitachi’s innovation-led growth.

“We grow through innovation, not acquisition.”

Conclusion: Partners at the Heart of India’s Data-First Future

Looking ahead, Somaiya sees India’s data footprint growing by 15% or more annually, with massive expansion in data-centre capacity and hybrid architectures.

Through its 100% partner-led model, strong alliances, sustainability leadership, and virtualisation-first design, Hitachi Vantara aims to help enterprises navigate this growth without disruption.

“Our partners are at the heart of our success. Together, we will continue to deliver reliable, scalable, and secure data infrastructure, on-prem, hybrid, or multi-cloud.”

Read More:

AceCloud on AI infrastructure: GPUs, sovereign Cloud & Agentic AI

Union Budget 2026–27: IT industry expectations on infrastructure, AI and digital growth