Big Conversations and Back Country Skiing

When I’m on a mountain skiing the tracks of the back country or dropping in off cornices I’m thinking about the three B’s: Big Conversations, Back Country and Beacons.  What is back country skiing? It’s typically an unpatrolled area inside or outside of a ski resorts boundary or unmarked which creates a distinct experience from groomed trails with ski patrol. For me as a technology leader., I find it invigorating to navigate unchartered territories with my buddies while fostering distinct experiences. 

At Hitachi Vantara in my role as Vice President of the Americas Partner Sales and Alliances, I’ve found  that navigating my team on a journey with our partners in the big conversation equally exciting as mountain skiing. We are charting new courses around data discussions which range from machine, business and connected data to differentiate and create new value. In fact, I’m in new cutting-edge customer and partner conversations every day that center around return on data and beyond. 

Hitachi isn’t just a brand, it’s a talent empire navigating new innovations when it comes to products, services, societal solutions. What motivates me as a leader every single day is the talented workforce with diverse expertise across our Hitachi Limited portfolio of businesses who are driven by passion to seek out new big conversations that foster new possibilities in our day to day lives.   

Which is interesting as these big conversations make these more of a discussion than a technology. It’s all about business problems and data transformation. Then we layer on the extensive knowledge and competencies within our partner ecosystem and you can easily see how the stairway to value is realized from core infrastructure that allows our customers to monetize the data they have today, extract value from it and seek out new possibilities on this data. 

The possibilities seem endless to me. If you simply focus on our healthcare business, we make MRI and body scanning machines and own ten hospitals in Japan. That coupled with our Hitachi analytics capabilities, we can effectively and efficiently harness the power of the body scanners and MRI sensors records and blend that information with patient records to do more with the data to help diagnose and save lives faster. It’s incredible to work with the data scientists who are evolving data modeling with regards to our information data models so that we can help transform the future of healthcare. Imagine how our future will evolve into real time decision making based on increased diagnostic and patient care to improve societies worldwide. 

We have expertise in energy, communications, rail, government and retail as well. Yet, when I think about my lunch conversation today, I was discussing the complex data sets that drive a recruiting company’s value proposition and how they are interested to find new ways to harness the power of the thousands of resumes they process and power their business.   We had big conversations around aligning everything from content types such as resumes, key words, google search results, API solutions, social networks, geo spatial data insights, work history and industry expertise which correlate to faster and better candidate selections and hiring decisions.  

Although the traditional data center partners are still huge for us at Hitachi Vantara, we are accelerating business transformation by holding new conversations, big conversations around data. We are looking at new partners that are outside the data center to help solve business problems and do more with the data and IoT. For example, video surveillance partners that are traditional with a bucket truck and a camera on a pole are engaging with smart city integrators and collaborating with multiple sources and agencies to ensure that city busses flow seamlessly and parking is ample and efficient. So, although we work on data center modernization projects with many of our existing partners, there is astounding interest around cameras and smart factories today.

I’m proud to be working with a world class Partner Enablement team who are working with our customers to augment the services we wrap around the solutions and I’m personally managing the metrics on training. We have an incredible workshop program which allows our partners to work with our experts which has resulted in our partners launching new IoT initiatives. It’s more than just whiteboarding, they are shadowing our team and working together to create these incredible cutting-edge solutions in the field today. Which resembles unmarked territory to many, yet to me it feels like another day of back country skiing.

Let us continue this conversation during our Hitachi NEXT event in San Diego next week or follow me on Twitter.