Hitachi has completed its acquisition of digital engineering and experience design specialist GlobalLogic — with a view to increasing its abilities in Agile development of cloud software and services.
Toshiaki Higashihara, executive chair and chief executive of Hitachi, indicated in the announcement that the Tokyo-based family of companies would as a result boost its chances of “collaborative creation” across its new digital products worldwide.
“Hitachi aims to become a global leader in the ‘social innovation’ business by accelerating digital transformation of social infrastructure,” Higashihara said.
Sashank Samant, president and chief executive of US-based GlobalLogic, said the merged operation would be able to target IT, operations technology (OT) and Internet of Things (IoT) requirements “under one umbrella”.
“Joining the Hitachi group creates a unique opportunity,” Samant said.
UK subsidiary Hitachi Solutions is increasingly focused on the business case around data-driven analytics, for example.
Jonathan Scott, data science and analytics team leader at Hitachi Solutions, said: “Data can drive innovation powering business change, but without careful management and governance of the collection of data, it can fail to deliver the promised value.”
Most manufacturers are recognising the benefits of an Agile approach to support innovation, even though this can take time and the challenge is often securing the budget to deliver a data project, Scott said in a Hitachi Solutions blog post.
An industrial manufacturer had told Hitachi they could quadruple the effectiveness of their production lines by using data to improve quality and accuracy.
“The short-term pain of collecting data for a well-defined purpose – fitting sensors to the production line to measure key performance metrics – and the resultant business value generated by doing so were easily demonstrable to the business decision-makers and budget holders,” Scott wrote.
( Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash )
