Hitachi IoT: Company Announces $2.8 Billion Investment

Global technology and manufacturing company Hitachi announced it is increasing its IoT efforts with a $2.8 billion investment and the launch of a new IoT investment group and platform.

The announcement was made on May 10 at the 2016 IoT World Conference. The new IoT group, Hitachi Insight, headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, will drive the company’s IoT business worldwide and focus on four key IoT verticals: smart cities, smart energy, smart healthcare and smart industry. It will also work to expand the company’s 33 current IoT offerings.

 “The greatest opportunity for IoT lies in enterprise industrial and public sector markets, which stand to benefit significantly from digital transformation,” said Vernon Turner of IDC in a press release. He added that traditional product-based business models are giving way to an “everything-as-a-service” approach.

Hitachi’s new Lumada IoT platform will serve as the core infrastructure for all of the company’s IoT solutions going forward, Hitachi said, and the platform’s open architecture will provide streaming analytics, content intelligence, simulation models, and other tools, including simple integration with partner technologies. Hitachi’s current partners include SAP, Dell, Microsoft, AT&T and Intel.

“Lumada was specifically designed to address the challenges associated with IoT solution creation,” Hitachi said in a release. The platform “accelerates synthesizing of actionable insights, delivering faster time to value and supporting better decisions that lead to real world outcomes, like increased productivity and safety, streamlined processes, reduced operational costs and carbon footprint, or improved quality of life.”

The new group and platform will unite Hitachi’s IoT and digital branches under one roof with the goal of increased IoT market share. Research firm IDC predicts the global IoT industry will grow to $1.46 trillion by 2020.

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