Hitachi Intends To Disrupt The IoT Market With New Appliances & Software Stacks

Today at Hitachi NEXT 2017 in Las Vegas, Hitachi Ltd. and Hitachi Vantara made announcements around the Internet of things (IoT). The two companies are jointly releasing the first commercially available Lumada IoT platform. This v2.0 of the platform now has a portable architecture enabling it to run on the cloud or on-prem. Vantara also unveiled Hitachi IoT Appliance, powered by Lumada, Hitachi’s IoT platform.

Today at Hitachi NEXT 2017 in Las Vegas, Hitachi Ltd. and Hitachi Vantara made announcements around the Internet of things (IoT). The two companies are jointly releasing the first commercially available Lumada IoT platform. This v2.0 of the platform now has a portable architecture enabling it to run on the cloud or on-prem. Vantara also unveiled Hitachi IoT Appliance, powered by Lumada, Hitachi’s IoT platform.

As we pointed to early today, IoT is becoming big business with potential for insights that can improve various levels of any company. Organizations looking to take advantage of these benefits need a secure IoT solution to connect physical assets, ingest and blend data from disparate sources at high speeds, and turn it into actionable insights without disruption to normal business processes. Realizing this, Hitachi Vantara announced two solutions to deal with these issues.

The new version of Lumada IoT platform helps customers quickly gain insights from their data, from the midrange up to larger enterprises. The platforms analytics have now been enhanced with AI functionality at scale, resulting in a highly intelligent and flexible platform that accelerates superior outcomes for enterprise and industrial customers, such as increased operational efficiencies and cost savings, enhanced operational safety and reliability, improved asset utilization, performance management and product quality, and the creation of new business models.

One of the new advancements in this new version of Lumada IoT platform are asset avatars. These avatars provide a digital representation of physical assets and rich metadata for analytics, serving as a digital proxy for business and industrial assets and providing rapid data-driven insights into their health and performance, with continuously updated sensor values. Hitachi Vantara states that this will improve access to – and insights from – business, machine and human data, which can help users, move more rapidly from measurement to management to improvement. Other enhancements provide IoT developers and architects with design tools and features that simplify the creation and deployment industrial IoT solutions, with faster time to insight.

Other capabilities include:

• Lumada edge: Allows any variety and velocity of data to be easily ingested, transformed and analyzed in close proximity to physical assets.
• Lumada core: Provides asset registry, identity and access management and simplifies the creation of asset avatars.
• Lumada analytics: Blends OT and IT data to uncover patterns with powerful analytics, machine learning and AI.
• Lumada studio: Delivers predefined widgets to simplify the creation of dashboard applications; issues alerts, notifications or just straight through processing.
• Lumada foundry: Offers foundational services to ease deployment on-premises and in the cloud, as well as security, microservices and support features.

The other solution announced today is the Hitachi IoT Appliance, a turnkey system that the company calls a “hyperconverged meets microservices” architecture. The appliance combines storage, compute, and networking with the latest Lumada software above. The appliance is designed to be simple. It is a plug-and-play solution that is pre-architected and pre-validated and can be deployed and ready to run in under an hour. The appliance can also help customers more rapidly realize the benefits of Lumada’s advanced data blending and orchestration, artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics capabilities. This means they will be gathering insights faster and thus reaping the benefits more quickly.

Availability

Hitachi’s Lumada IoT platform software is generally available now for purchase and in co-creation engagements with Hitachi and selects partners. Some features may not be immediately available in all markets. Hitachi IoT Appliance will be generally available later this year, wherever Lumada IoT Platform software is offered.

Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi NEXT

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