What It Takes to Keep India Online: A Look Inside Hitachi Vantara’s Strategy

India’s digital economy is growing at breakneck speed. From real-time payments and government e-services to the explosion of retail investing and mobile-first platforms, data is piling up faster than ever—and enterprises are scrambling to keep up.

Behind the scenes, a few key players are quietly building the infrastructure to make this scale possible. One of them is Hitachi Vantara. Once known mainly for its traditional storage systems, the company is now carving out a bigger role in India’s hybrid cloud, AI, and cybersecurity story.

Dataquest sat down with Hemant Tiwari, Managing Director and Vice President, India and SAARC Region, Hitachi Vantara, and Jay Subramanian, Global SVP of Products, to unpack how the company is evolving—and what it means for the future of enterprise IT in India.

When Hemant Tiwari took over as Managing Director of Hitachi Vantara India in 2018, the company was facing stagnation. Its presence in key industries was limited, and growth had plateaued. Since then, the Indian arm of the data infrastructure firm has undergone a slow but strategic repositioning—focused on expanding market share, strengthening partnerships, and establishing India as a core delivery and innovation hub for global operations.

A Strategic Reorientation

Tiwari outlines a growth plan that centers around doubling revenue every three years while broadening the company’s customer base. Despite a flat pandemic period, the company says it gained market share and resumed strong growth post-COVID, particularly in banking and public sector workloads.

“The real intent was to become a partner of choice for critical workloads,” Tiwari says. Over time, this focus has translated into deeper engagement across government systems, state data centers, and BFSI institutions. Among Hitachi Vantara’s more visible customers are central government agencies. 

The Hybrid Cloud Turn

Hitachi Vantara’s transition from an on-premise infrastructure company to one that supports hybrid cloud environments reflects broader industry 

“Customers don’t want to be forced to choose between on-prem and cloud anymore—they want to use both, and use them intelligently,” says Subramanian.

This hybrid-first strategy involves building a unified platform that supports applications across edge, core, and cloud. It’s designed to handle block, file, and object data uniformly, while also incorporating features like AI-based policy automation and disaggregated control planes.

According to the company, this approach allows for consistent performance and management regardless of where workloads reside.

The growing scale and complexity of data environments, especially in sectors like banking and telecom, has accelerated the demand for such flexibility.

The philosophy? Applications are meaningless without accessible, intelligent data—and the company’s evolving infrastructure strategy is built around that truth.

Building India as a Global Tech Powerhouse

India’s role within the company’s global operations has expanded significantly, both as a market and a talent hub. The engineering team in India has grown from around 150 in 2018 to nearly 2,000 today, spanning R&D, AI platforms, IT services, and software delivery.

Tiwari acknowledges that while manufacturing enterprise-grade hardware in India remains challenging, the country is playing a key role in developing the software intelligence layer of its infrastructure products. This aligns with the government’s ‘Make in India’ vision, albeit in a limited capacity.

“Manufacturing enterprise storage systems locally is still a challenge. But we are already embedding software and intelligence into our global products from India. That’s the real value-add.” Tiwari adds.

Sectoral Growth and Demand Drivers

Post-COVID, India has witnessed an extraordinary acceleration in digital infrastructure. From the explosion of UPI and digital payments to increased activity in capital markets, data workloads have scaled dramatically. And with that has come a parallel surge in regulatory, compliance, and cybersecurity needs.

“We’ve seen unprecedented demand across BFSI, government, and even telecom,” Tiwari notes. “When I joined, we had zero telco clients. Today, three out of four major telcos are on our platform.”

That expansion is now spreading into new sectors like manufacturing and media.

Cyber Resilience as a Differentiator

With ransomware and data breaches becoming increasingly common, cyber resilience has become a core area of focus for infrastructure providers. Hitachi Vantara has been investing in features like immutable snapshots, anomaly detection, and rapid recovery systems.

The company claims its systems can handle multiple simultaneous component failures without service disruption—features designed to appeal to sectors where downtime is unacceptable.

Subramanian adds, “We’re constantly investing in ways to ensure that if a customer is attacked, they can recover instantly and continue operating. That’s not just IT—it’s business continuity.”

AI That Learns From You

Another area of development is infrastructure that evolves over time based on usage. The idea, says Tiwari, is for systems to learn from the customer’s workload and optimize accordingly—so even two identical setups might function differently based on the context.

“Contextual adaptability becomes critical when you’re operating at the scale India demands,” he says, referring to high-transaction environments like banking and public services.

The Mindset of Future-Ready Leaders

As digital transformation reshapes enterprise IT, Tiwari and Subramanian agree on one thing: the future belongs to leaders who keep learning.

“Continuous upskilling is non-negotiable—especially in areas like GenAI and cybersecurity,” says Subramanian. But it’s not just about tech. “You have to nurture talent and culture too,” adds Tiwari. “People talk. Word spreads fast. If you want to stay competitive, you need to treat your people like the assets they are.”

That strategy seems to be working—when asked about customer churn, Tiwari smiles: “We don’t lose customers.”

Conclusion: Building the Backbone of Digital India

Hitachi Vantara’s evolution mirrors India’s own digital ascent—ambitious, resilient, and focused on scale. With AI-infused infrastructure, a powerful hybrid cloud play, and a people-first approach, the company is poised to not only support but shape the future of enterprise IT in India and beyond.

As the infrastructure landscape becomes more distributed and data-centric, companies like Hitachi Vantara are seeking to position themselves as enablers of resilient, flexible systems that can operate at scale.

Whether this strategy pays off in terms of sustained market share and customer retention in a competitive space remains to be seen. But for now, the company is leaning into hybrid cloud, AI-driven infrastructure, and India’s growing digital appetite as the pillars of its next phase.