Hitachi sees huge growth coming from converged solutions in India

India is already one of the fastest growing markets for adoption of cloud-based solutions. A recent Gartner survey, for instance, predicted that 53 percent of organizations in India indicate they are using cloud services today, with another 43 percent indicating plans to begin using cloud services in the next 12 months. As organizations look to deploy workloads between private and public clouds, they are often overwhelmed with challenges to procure, test, assemble, integrate and monitor silos of resources.

This is fueling the growth for converged solutions, which include server, storage, and network components in a pre-configured and pre-tested bundle. Hitachi, which has focused converged solutions, is seeing a growing acceptance of unified compute platforms where the management and orchestration of server, storage, and network resources can be done through one pane of glass.

Says Sunil Chavan, Senior Director, Solution Sales, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, "Our converged solutions have become one of the fastest growing business segments. In 2014, we witnessed our global system integrator (GSI) partners such as Infosys and Wipro using our converged solutions to help their customers migrate into the EMEA and Europe markets."

Chavan says that as converged infrastructures scale more easily than silo architectures, there is now an increased focus on converged solutions. The market for converged infrastructure is huge. For instance, a recent study by IDC has projected that spending by organizations on converged infrastructure will reach $17.8 billion by 2016.

With the Indian government's increasing focus on using digital technologies to transform governance, Hitachi is looking at opportunities in the government sector. "We are talking to the public sector and are determined to extend our expertise in convergence technologies across the telecom, healthcare and e-governance sectors. Our goal is to take our converged infrastructure initiative forward with a focus on the government sector especially with regard to the efficient delivery of e-governance initiatives and delivering citizen services," states Chavan.

As CIOs focus more on using IT to drive business, the need for converged infrastructure is set to increase. Chavan also foresees increased investments going in automation tools. "In 2015, we will see greater investment in management automation tools. Provisioning of applications and orchestration of workloads will be done based on templates. Management automation will begin to include exception monitoring, alerting, root cause analysis and automated remediation. Orchestration will include the movement of workloads between clouds, private and public to align the appropriate infrastructure based on cost, performance, locality, and governance. Management automation will be facilitated by a converged infrastructure," says he.