Hitachi Vantara is embedding AI agents throughout its storage systems, seeing customers embrace more hybrid cloud and on-premise AI architectures and betting on AI at the edge and sovereign AI as growth markets.
Those are some of the takeaways from Octavian Tanase, Chief Product Officer at Hitachi Vantara.
Constellation Insights caught up with Tanase at Hitachi Vantara's Analyst Live 2025 event in Arlington, VA. At the analyst meeting, Hitachi Vantara highlighted its strategy, customer enterprise AI and industrial AI use cases, hybrid cloud and AI efforts, collaboration with partners including Cisco and Nvidia and how its storage and data platform is leveraging the One Hitachi strategy. Here's a look at the takeaways from the conversation with Tanase.
Enterprise AI adoption. "We see a lot of demand from enterprises looking to get insights out of that data, and use AI to improve productivity," he said. "There's a rush right now to build autonomous modules that will take a business workflow and solve and anticipate problems in an enterprise. Customers are looking to bring in a large language model and train and fine tune with enterprise data before they deploy for inference."
Integrated software with hardware. "We've always seen ourselves as a systems company that builds both software and systems for storage and data management. Storage has been commoditized, and there is more value that can be delivered in software to use not only the data for an application, but to run analytics on that data to get more insights from the data. This is an area of investment for us," said Tanase.
Hitachi Vantara's agentic AI strategy. Tanase said Hitachi Vantara is using AI agents internally for productivity and within the products leveraging it for more autonomy. "We are in the business of providing infrastructure for AI data pipelines that include storage, compute, networking, security and so forth. We are embedding capabilities around the data reduction or data tiering or data classification. These are all areas where one could create an agent and transform a task that required the control and the input of a person into something autonomous," said Tanase.
Customer use cases. "We see a lot of use cases around analytics. A lot of times people will make two or three copies of data. Enterprises are looking to run analytics on data and use AI to do that and coordinate large data sets from heterogeneous data sources," said Tanase.
On-premise and hybrid AI evolution. Tanase said most enterprises started with AI in the cloud because GPUs-as-a-service doesn't require a massive initial investment. What's happening now is enterprises are looking to put AI infrastructure closer to the data. "If the data source is in the traditional data center or being brought from an edge device, enterprises are building AI infrastructure where the data is," said Tanase. "It's too expensive to correlate multiple data silos and move that to the cloud. Customers are sometimes better off building a data lake into their traditional enterprise and then deploying training and inference closer to the data."
Edge computing's importance. "I am a firm believer that there is more data being created at the edge and in the cloud than the data center," said Tanase. "AI will give the power to analyze the data as its created and perhaps enable customers to become more discerning about their data and understand what they need to keep and protect. I'm hoping many of these capabilities in the future are autonomous."
The product roadmap. "Going forward, AI is fundamentally changing everything. The market is moving fast and the standardization of MCP (model context protocol) and other protocols are enabling AI modules to talk to each other," said Tanase. "In order to be relevant in this market, you have to act with agility in a way many companies have not experienced before. Time to market, constant innovation and the reality that no one vendor can do it all are critical."
Tanase added that customers will see integrated systems from Hitachi Vantara and a wide range of natural partners including Nvidia, Cisco, Supermicro, Hammerspace and Commvault to name a few.
Sovereign AI. Tanase said sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming a big market. "AI has become a matter of national security for many countries or provinces, and there is a lot of need to integrate and build sovereign AI," said Tanase. "We live in a very polarized world, and I can see states, governments, and provinces building sovereign AI infrastructure. It's a part of what everybody does in order to compete in the 21st century."
Final word. Tanase said Hitachi Vantara has earned the right to play in the AI space and is being used for critical business applications leveraging structured and unstructured data via VSP 360 and a wide range of systems. "We know our customers. We want to save them time. We invest a lot of tools to enable automation, and we believe that's critical, because people want repeatable results," he said. "Automation is top of mind. We're a leader in infrastructure sustainability and sustainable products save customers money in terms of floor in the data center, cooling power and overall cost of ownership."
