Hitachi 

Integrate the infrastructure of decentralized groups spanning Hitachi’s broad scope of businesses

The Hitachi Group has a wide range of businesses including healthcare, power systems, transportation, urban development, information and telecommunication systems. For further growth, Hitachi focuses on Social Innovation Business as its core corporate strategy.

Social Innovation is where Hitachi’s total solution is maximized based on its various technologies. However, each group company’s collaboration was required more than ever to achieve this. Hitachi is now promoting consolidation of infrastructure that would support the whole group’s business.

There are business-related infrastructure such as financial, accounting and IT systems that needed to be integrated. Especially for IT infrastructure, a globally integrated network was critical.

‘Without a globally-integrated network, we cannot realize seamless communication between the groups,’ says Yasuo Ohashi of Hitachi.

Hitachi has expanded its business in six regional markets: Europe, America, Asia, China, India, and Japan. Previously, each region implemented and developed its own network according to their specific needs.

‘The IT Services Division, responsible for the group’s IT infrastructure has been providing connection guidelines but each group ended up having different outsourcing criteria, SLA and operations.’ says Eiji Katoh of Hitachi.

This led to a several issues where connection between Japanese and European devices are different from that of Japanese and Chinese. Furthermore, the increasing number of connections was stressing the network, slowing the speed of group collaboration business. The need for standardization and integration was growing higher in the group.

On top of this, there were unnecessary costs caused by investment conflicts within the group and security was compromised in the cost-oriented regions.

Peace of mind from dedicated team and accelerated infrastructure integration

Leveraging NTT, Hitachi built GWAN, a large-scale group network, connecting 300,000 users in six regions with 260 circuits. The new network not only strengthened the group collaboration but also eliminated unnecessary costs of investment conflicts and enforced security by a unified policy.

During the implementation NTT’s support was beyond Hitachi’s expectations. To support the global project, we formed a dedicated team of 8 regional member for a seamless communication.’ In addition to providing face-to-face communication, the project team also allowed us to immediately see how far the project was progressing in each area, giving us real peace of mind. And we especially admired NTT’s ability to manage local carriers. Thanks to them, this large-scale project went smoothly,’ says Katoh.

Connection of the main group companies and offices to GWAN is almost completed. For the future, Hitachi is considering further integration by preparing a plan with more focus on the scale and situation of local offices to provide better cost performance. The company will also continue utilizing GWAN to integrate infrastructure, for example by adopting Microsoft’s Unified Communication as a standard tool to support the collaboration between group companies.

Integration of business infrastructure such as accounting, human resources and the like has also been accelerated.

Hitachi Group now has the strong network infrastructure to support Social Innovation Business.’ We are aiming to make Hitachi a globally competitive company. We expect to leverage NTT’s global capability again in the future to meet our IT needs in various ways,’ says Ohashi.