David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

Now more than ever, effective data management is crucial to enable decision-makers to better assess information and take calculated actions. It is also important to keep up with the latest trends and technologies to derive higher value from data and analytics and maintain a competitive edge in the market. However, every organization faces challenges with data management and analytics. And as organizations scale, the complexity only increases, creating a need for better data governance, data quality and streamlined and automated processes. DataOps can help solve many of the challenges organizations encounter when trying to unlock the power of data by expanding data use to various parts of an organization. Hitachi Vantara offers DataOps technology that enables organizations to improve data agility and automation. It provides cloud-ready infrastructure, advanced data management software and a broad range of support services.

Hitachi Vantara is a subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., delivering various offerings for enterprises and midsize organizations, including infrastructure, storage, data and analytics software, consulting and industry-focused managed services. Hitachi Vantara Lumada DataOps software offers capabilities for automated, artificial intelligence-driven data operations. It provides users advanced analytics for industrial use cases, and can create an integrated data fabric that is supported by a data catalog for data quality improvements and governance. Organizations can build various data products that potentially accelerate time to insight and improve customer experience.

Hitachi has made several acquisitions and combined them with internal developments to build out DataOps capabilities. It acquired Pentaho in 2015 for its data integration and visualization capabilities, and acquired Waterline Data in 2020, incorporating its data cataloging technology into its Lumada Data Catalog application to solve data challenges for analytics and governance across cloud environments.

Hitachi Vantara’s data integration and analytics platform is powered by Pentaho and enables users to build and deploy data pipelines for automation. It offers a no-code solution with a drag and drop interface for on-premises and cloud data integrations. Its transformation engine allows users to visualize, blend and connect data from on-premises or cloud, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Its data flow orchestration capability allows users to switch between native Kettle and Spark engines and operationalize artificial intelligence and machine learning models based on R, Python, Scala and WEKA.

With Pentaho Data Integration, organizations can access data from various complex and heterogeneous sources and integrate it without writing code. Its graphical user interface – paired with a multithreaded transformation engine – offers extract, transform and load capabilities that cover data integration needs, including big data ingestion and processing.

Data Catalog enables data engineers, data scientists and end users to automatically discover and tag data across the organization using machine learning. This decreases the risk of manual processing errors and prevents data silos. Organizations can also use Data Catalog to ensure compliance with regulatory mandates by systemizing and rationalizing the data. Its Data Optimizer for Hadoop provides data tiering capabilities that enable users to optimize data across Hadoop Distributed File System and object storage, balancing speed of access and cost of storage across different workloads.

Our research indicates that the more data catalog users an organization has, the greater the trust the organization has in its data and the higher the level of confidence in the organization’s ability to govern and manage data across the business. Almost three-quarters (74%) of organizations with more than 100 data catalog users have trust in the data used in decision-making and operations, compared to 66% of those with 100 or less data catalog users. Similarly, three-quarters (75%) of organizations with more than 100 data catalog users are confident in the organization’s ability to govern and manage data across the business, compared to 56% of organizations with 100 or less data catalog users.

Lumada Industrial DataOps and IoT Software is an extension of its data and analytics capabilities and automates onboarding, integrating, contextualizing, transforming and governing IT and operational technology data for analysis, including AI/ML-based applications. Last year, Hitachi launched Lumada Inspection Insights, which is its portfolio of digital applications for the inspection, monitoring and optimization of infrastructure and critical assets, using AI/ML to analyze photographs and video, including LiDAR, thermal and satellite imagery.

Hitachi Vantara has chosen to concentrate on the DataOps market. DataOps is enabling organizations to be more agile in data processes. My colleague Matt Aslett asserts that through 2025, awareness of DataOps will continue to increase as organizations adapt data integration and engineering processes to the growing need for continuous and automated data ingestion, transformation and delivery. With parent company Hitachi’s background of providing software and services to a broad range of industries, the company is strongly positioned in the IoT sector. It enables organizations to embed data integration and analytics into various workflows to speed up processes.

While Hitachi Vantara has made significant investments to create a DataOps product line, it appears to have struggled with rationalizing the branding of the products. After bringing products together under the Lumada branding, it has alternately downplayed and then featured the Pentaho brand, causing confusion and making it more difficult to understand the elements in its portfolio.

Organizations face an increasing challenge to manage and extract value from a growing variety and volume of data across an edge-to-cloud infrastructure. By using DataOps to manage and govern data, organizations can better control data and analytics processes, lower costs and increase productivity. I recommend that organizations looking to streamline and automate data management, data discovery and analytics evaluate Hitachi Vantara. It can speed time to insight and improve information quality for better analytics and decision-making. 

Regards,

David Menninger