Hitachi Data Systems Corp. started with a focus on hardware solutions and supporting the infrastructure. But more recently the wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. has significantly increased its software portfolio to meet the data-driven needs of customers. As new releases from VMware Inc. and other enterprise suppliers become available, integration with servers and backend storage becomes key. This understanding of customer requirements has given HDS insight into how to keep information technology operations running smoothly, and control becomes the operative word, according to Bob Madaio (pictured), vice president of infrastructure solutions marketing at HDS.

“Customers have trialed a lot, and they’re now beginning to get a better sense of what data types and what applications really can be in the cloud. We can give them centralized control of disparate cloud sources,” Madaio said.

Madaio stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed Hitachi’s recent announcements at VMworld, customer concerns around data management and how HDS is working on new technologies for the Internet of Things space. (* Disclosure below.)

New rack-scale and hyperconverged products

Hitachi made two announcements during VMworld, unveiling efforts to enhance its Unified Compute Platform, or UCP, portfolio. The first was a fully integrated, software-defined rack-scale platform, called UCP RS, that will be powered by VMware Inc.’s Cloud Foundation. The second was an enhancement of its hyperconverged product, called UCP HC, which will now be enabled with non-volatile memory, or NVMe, and new Intel processors.

“That takes our building blocks of the hyperconverged and brings all the Cloud Foundation tools and SDDC [software-defined data center] wrapped up and ready for the customer,” Madaio said.

Customers are making it clear to HDS that they are concerned about all aspects of managing data these days, with a focus on meeting regulatory demands, such as General Data Protection Regulation (European data governance) and improving the speed of data delivery in IT services.

“It’s definitely moving toward an outcome-based conversation. We ask, ‘What are you trying to do with your data, and can we help you with that?’” Madaio said.

One need of particular interest to HDS involves managing the deluge of sensor-drive IoT data. This ties into Hitachi’s core industrial business, which includes building medical devices and earth-moving equipment.

The company has a software architecture called Lumada that’s designed to create IoT solutions for a range of industrial applications. “We have that central platform that’s going to scale and ingest all of that machine data. We’ll have some big announcements coming out in the near future around that,” Madaio concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Hitachi Data Systems Corp. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE