Hitachi Vantara LLC is building on a collaboration with Microsoft Corp. announced last year to create an AI-ready full stack platform leveraging Azure for delivering a hybrid cloud solution.

The agreement between the two companies launched Hitachi Unified Compute Platform for Azure Stack HCI, delivering enhanced cloud management across multiple environments encompassing data centers and the edge.

“The partnership between Hitachi and Microsoft has been very sound for the last decade, but more recently we’ve advanced that partnership significantly with a global strategic agreement,” said Rollen Roberson (pictured), vice president of hyperscalers and cloud at Hitachi Vantara, the infrastructure, data management and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. “With our UCP platform integrated with Azure Stack, it’s now allowing us to accelerate more quickly into the market in partnership with Microsoft. What once started as a reference architecture has now evolved into a full compute, full stack platform, AI-ready for our customers.”

Roberson spoke with theCUBE Research’s Rob Strechay at Microsoft Ignite 2024, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Hitachi Vantara’s evolving partnership with Microsoft in the delivery of a hybrid cloud solution.

Integrator supports hybrid cloud solution

Hitachi Vantara has found that many customers are just beginning to experiment with AI applications, and this is creating challenges along the way, according to Roberson. His company has partnered with a leading global cloud services systems integrator that specializes in Microsoft business applications to address support needs.

“AI is a very customized type of workload that is specific to the business that our customers are in,” Roberson said. “To help with that journey, we’ve teamed up with our sister company, Hitachi Solutions, who is one of Microsoft’s premier services companies that helps build many of the applications and products you see today on Azure. We’re providing the underlying data fabric, storage capability, compute, a lot of the weight that data brings.”

Part of Hitachi Vantara’s strategy is to help its customer base migrate mission critical applications to the ideal platform. In partnership with Microsoft, Hitachi Vantara will be making a cross-platform solution generally available, an offering that should be of interest to regulated industries.

“We have a trusted user base that looks at our platform predominantly on-premises for highly regulated industries and they now want to extend it into the cloud,” Roberson explained. “We are introducing our software-defined storage on Azure, which should be generally available come mid-summer. With that comes all of the performance and characteristics and comfort for data security that our customers have today, but now they can use it in the cloud, move to the cloud and back.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2024:

Photo: SiliconANGLE