Hitachi CEO Higashihara: Lumada Is The Engine For 'Powering Good'

'The new Hitachi Vantara will continue to deliver cutting-edge innovation in edge to cloud infrastructure,' Hitachi CEO Toshiaki Higashihara says at Hitachi Vantara's Next conference in Las Vegas.

Hitachi Ltd. CEO Toshiaki Higashihara said the company's Lumada portfolio for IoT and data operations solutions serves as the engine to achieve the company's goal of "powering good."

Higashihara made the remarks Wednesday at the Next conference in Las Vegas held by Hitachi Vantara, the Japanese conglomerate's enterprise technology subsidiary that is undergoing another reorganization two years after it was formed through the merger of three business.

[Related: Partners: Hitachi Vantara's Consulting Play Will Boost IoT Channel Efforts]

"The issues are becoming more and more complicated," Higashihara said, noting that issues like globalization and climate change cannot be resolved by products alone but by a platform-level approach that includes cooperation among businesses.

Higashihara said Hitachi Vantara's work on Lumada, which was introduced two years ago as an IoT platform, is driven by innovation "that not only benefits business but also society," underlying the company's social innovation mission.

To drive this home, Higashihara brought up the example of Hitachi high-speed trains in the United Kingdom that cut commute times by more than 40 minutes using Lumada and other technologies. The CEO said he had the chance to meet someone who experienced the commuting improvement first-hand.

"She said, 'Now I can have breakfast with my family because I have enough time in the morning,'" Higashihara said.

With the new Hitachi Vantara organization—which will involve the merging of the existing business with Hitachi Consulting in January—the company will expand its digital capabilities and "unlock a new level of value creation" for Hitachi's more than 10,000 customers and 2,000 partners, according to Higashihara.

"The new Hitachi Vantara will continue to deliver cutting-edge innovation in edge to cloud infrastructure," he said.

Brian Householder—Hitachi Vantara's CEO who is moving into a new executive role with the restructuring— said it's important for businesses to understand that data is the new "driver for growth" and the new basis for which they need to compete and survive.

"In the next decade, half of Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist because they're no longer adapting to these [new] rules," he said, citing a study.

Householder said companies will need to wrangle the expanding amount of data through new workloads like artificial intelligence, machine learning and augmented reality as well as new architecture for edge and multi-cloud environments and new approaches like data operations.

"This is the new world that we live in," he said. "This is the area we want to continue to partner with you."