Big Data will go out of proof-of-concept

What are the biggest barriers to big data in the Asia Pacific region?

The top three barriers we found was:

• software to actually build some of these big data scenarios either does not exist or is still evolving,
• in-house skills and people that need to build the algorithms or assemble the solutions, because we're not yet producing big data scientists.
• Information silos

This means that big data has been more of a term used by IT and less about business.

What does Hitachi recommend?

First, think about data as a capital. The more data an organization has the more returns they should be seeing on their business.
Second, you can get more from the information that you already have that you are not currently using. Most people are getting excited about social media etc. But most of that is already lying in the data they already have.

Third: Ensuring that IT is involved. Where IT can help is when we are to start our big data projects with information we already have and historical information, in many cases we find that they are not easily accessible.

One of my predictions is big data will go out of proof of concept and into production in established markets.

Give us an example where big data has changed the business.

For instance Alibaba, which has years of e-commerce transactional history, has been mining that information they have to get insights on certain behaviour around buying and selling and enter financial services. They have used their historical information to apply an algorithmic view of human behaviour around buying and selling to predict their credit risk. So they are able to offer higher interest rate returns. They are using big data to fundamentally change their offering to the marketplace. And it has been very successful.

Any such examples in India?

An Indian big data telecom software company, that cannot be named, unfortunately, sells completely to the outside world. What is interesting is the number of Indian companies delivering big data not inside of India but outside of India. Once the maturity comes to the market, India will be in a prime position.

How long do you think that's going to take?

Not going to crystal ball gaze, but it depends on governments to create a level playing field. If prices seem to be over inflated, government needs to intervene and that's what is happening in China.

How important is India to Hitachi Data Systems?

Hitachi Data Systems, has been in storage systems. We have been supplying high-end storage device to 10 out 10 Indian banks. We have manufacturing interests here as well. We are in a journey trying to evolve not just in storage but as a market that is maturing. In IT, this includes compute, software stacks et al.

In India, we are working with a number of global system integrators. We have had long term partnerships with organizations like Infosys, now we are trying to broaden with other service providers around verticalising some of their solutions. We have regional research centres, like a R&D centre in Bangalore. A year and half ago, all our R&D was done in Japan whereas now we are purposely putting it in the growth markets because we can learn quicker.

Are you expanding base in India?

Among Indian GSIs we are looking far more vertically. If you look at Wipro or Infosys, they are more Iaas, with TCS we are looking more at application, vertical knowledge, we are looking at tightening ourselves more into those stacks.

How does Hitachi plan to tackle the regulatory issues around cloud in India?

We are getting into cloud 2.0 where we are seeing more cloud brokerage models being formed. Our strategy has always been to deliver cloud in different ways.

We have a private, on premise solution for our traditional enterprise customer. Like banks, what they want is the convenience of provisioning, but building their own orchestration capabilities and the consumption models-but they want it on premise. So through our converged systems we deliver that.

Second, is through partnerships. So we embed our technology as part of our greater offering, whether its application as a service or software as a service.

The third type of cloud is aimed at the assembly market. Recently we committed to open up a service that we call cloud service as a connect in Hong Kong and have recently brought to India. The cloud service as a connect is effectively a application and software as a service offer that Hitachi runs in our own data centres and we use our bigger system of partners to resell that. At our core we are an infrastructure provider and we are playing in all sectors except public cloud.

Six months back we announced an integration of our content platform into Amazon S3 interface. On premise we can now actually bridge private and public cloud through those integration points. That's where we are just starting to explore.

In which industries do you see the fastest adoption?

Generally telecom providers understand the benefits of delivering from cloud, some have built their own clouds and offered SaaS.