Hitachi Vantara Arms Partners for Midmarket Storage Push
Vendor launches channel resources and new solutions for midsize enterprises
Hitachi Vantara is giving channel partners tools, incentives, and training as part of a larger push to expand its efforts to bring new infrastructure products to midsize enterprises.
The Lowdown: The new channel offerings, announced Tuesday, come in conjunction with Hitachi Vantara’s launch of an array of storage products for these smaller enterprises.
The Details: The new storage solutions announced by Hitachi Vantara, based in Santa Clara, California, include:
> VSP E590 and E790: The NVMe all-flash midrange storage appliances expand the vendor’s Virtual Storage Platform E-Series enterprise capabilities to the midrange space. Features include intelligent embedded management to simplify such tasks as installation, provisioning, and performance management. Other capabilities include analytics, workflow orchestration, and automation.
> Virtual Storage as a Service: Available via partners, the offering delivers enterprise-class cloud storage service to the midmarket either on-premises or via colocation sites, all available through a consumption-based pricing model.
> HNAS 5000: The family of storage solutions for distributed enterprise and data center application workloads enables organizations to consolidate file data on the same Hitachi Vantara VSP infrastructure they’re already using. They also can offload file data to remote targets, including public clouds.
To help partners drive these offerings into the midmarket, the vendor is unveiling new tools, incentives, and other resources, including:
> Dynamic pricing tool: Simplifies and accelerates the deal process through deal pricing guidance and automated deal-approval workflows.
> Hitachi Guru: It’s a recommendation tool for midrange storage.
> Training: Offerings include such training tools as sandboxes and online labs to grow partners’ knowledge of the solutions and speed sales opportunities.
> Marketing campaign assets: The pre-built, customizable, and easy-to-launch resources are available via Hitachi Vantara’s Partner Marketing Hub.
The Impact: Midsize enterprises are facing the same challenges caused by the explosion of data as their larger counterparts, but don’t always have the same budgets or IT staff resources. Hitachi Vantara noted numbers from 451 Research that while data volumes are growing 19% year-over-year, IT budgets are lagging at 10% growth. The vendor is aiming to give organizations and partners affordable and high-performing products.
Background: Hitachi created the Hitachi Vantara subsidiary in 2017 when it merged its IT business (Hitachi Data Systems), data analytics unit (Pentaho), and Internet of Things (IoT) business (Hitachi Insight Group), and then grew it more when it added the Hitachi Consulting subsidiary to expand its IoT expertise.
The Buzz: “Hitachi Vantara has long been the gold standard for high-performance data storage, but today we are raising the bar for midmarket storage too,” said Bobby Soni, president of digital infrastructure for Hitachi Vantara. “We are enabling all the industry-leading capabilities and intelligent software that have fueled the success of the VSP 5000 down market to our new E-series midmarket products, with aggressive price points and enhanced ease of use. With our new as-a-service offering, we’re further easing the burden of managing infrastructure so customers can focus on what matters most – managing their business.”
“Hitachi Vantara and our partners are excited to extend these powerful new enterprise-class offerings to midsize organizations to empower them to accelerate their transformation and achieve their business objectives – all at an attractive price point,” said Kimberly King, global vice president of strategic partners and alliances at Hitachi Vantara.
“Unlike large enterprises, midsize companies don’t have large IT staffs or enjoy the benefits of multimillion-dollar IT budgets,” said Enrico Signoretti, an analyst with GigaOm Research. “They are often stumped to find reliable solutions that can reduce IT spend, especially storage costs. Hitachi Vantara’s expanded E-Series line of high-performance NVMe all-flash arrays and new Virtual Storage as-a-Service targeted at the business-critical workloads of midsize customers should be a welcome addition to the market.”
“Many customers, particularly those in the midmarket, have previously felt that digital transformation was out of reach due to cost or complexity,” said Rich Naber, vice president of solutions consulting for Storage IT Solutions. “With these new offerings from Hitachi Vantara, we can help them achieve the benefits of transformation without sacrifice for real-world business impact.”
“Future-proofing is important to our customers,” said Stoneworks CTO Alan Rogers. “The intuitive embedded management of the Hitachi VSP E-Series allows our customers to take advantage of the new ease-of-use interface with a built-in path to federated management if required over time.”
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>Hitachi Vantara Puts Focus on DataOps
>Hitachi Looks to Expand IoT Reach
