The boss of Hitachi's new Irish division wants the country to be a 'hub' for the conglomerate
Gerry Murray is aiming to bring more of the Japanese giant’s data analytics and IoT projects here.
THE HEAD OF Hitachi’s new division in Ireland has big ambitions to bring more companies from the Japanese conglomerate to the country.
Hitachi Vantara was formed through a merger of three other Hitachi units to create one entity that would work on data management and analytic services.
The Dublin office was officially opened in March and will support Hitachi Vantara’s Irish customers under the leadership of Gerry Murray, a former country manager for Dell EMC here.
“It’s also my intention that it will be a hub for future Hitachi companies,” Murray told Fora.
“We’ve had Hitachi companies operate in Ireland in the past and we’ll have more going forward-looking into Ireland,” he said. “It will be a hub for the entire Hitachi corporation looking into Ireland as a potential place for investment.”
The Hitachi group employs more than 30,000 people worldwide and has interests in everything from IT to trains and power tools. The company currently also has a sales and support office for its products in Ireland with around 20 staff.
Hitachi Vantara was officially founded in September of last year through a consolidation of three companies – data storage arm Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Hitachi Insight Group, which specialised in IoT, and Pentaho, a business intelligence software company that was acquired by HDS in 2015.
Gerry Murray
At its core, Hitachi Vantara helps companies analyse and make sense of their data to derive value but also to do so in a compliant way – a vital feature now in the GDPR age.
“Globally we’d be very strong in financial services and manufacturing, but more and more we’re growing into all sorts of sectors from retail to pharma to life sciences,” Murray said.
Hitachi Vantara has eight large enterprise customers in Ireland. AIB is one of the customers that Murray is willing to disclose.
“The attempt now is to grow. The company hasn’t, in a former guise, really tried to expand beyond those large enterprises that it works with,” he said. “That’s my goal and to grow that side of the business.”
The Dublin team is relatively small at around 20 people so far, however Murray anticipates that figure will likely double over the next year.
“Both personally and as a company, it’s part of my remit to offer Ireland as a destination and I’ve a three-to-five-year timeline to deliver on that,” he said.
Industrial IoT
In 2013, the conglomerate secured a lucrative contract with the UK’s Department for Transport to build new intercity trains.
Hitachi Vantara is contributing to the expansive project by applying large-scale internet of things (IoT) sensors to the country’s intercity railway services.
According to the company, it’s an ambitious effort to modernise an old legacy system and gather and analyse data on how its trains are performing.
The internet of things is often associated with the consumer space – whether it’s internet-connected fridges or toasters that talk to the air conditioning – but industrial use cases are blooming as well.
The industrial internet of things market is tipped to reach more than $230 billion by 2023 according to analysts. Murray wants to bring projects like that to Ireland.
“That’s really where you’re putting your money where your mouth is in terms of the internet of things.”
The wider company is also looking at a project involving the management of data from electric vehicles and on the electricity grid.
“Again I’m hoping we can spin off from some of these programmes and bring them to Ireland,” Murray said.
The focus on applying new tech like IoT to manufacturing and traditional industry harkens back to Hitachi’s “legacy and tradition”, he added.
“Hitachi is an industrial conglomerate so part of our remit in Hitachi Vantara globally is to leverage all of the operational experience we have across manufacturing and other industrial areas,” he said.
This will involve collaboration with customers to design and build new projects.
“Two minds are better than one and we’re open to that co-creation moving forward.”
