Hitachi Vantara Raises Data Integration, Catalog, IIoT Stakes
Hitachi Vantara on Wednesday introduced enhancements to its Lumada DataOps platform and the release of its new Lumada Industrial DataOps portfolio. The releases deliver enhanced data integration, data governance, data quality and industrial Internet of things (IIoT) capabilities. Hitachi Vantara says the products can help customers build out their distributed data fabrics and achieve integration of IT and OT (operational technology).
Integration between IT and business users is also a factor. In a briefing with The New Stack earlier this week. Madhup Mishra, Hitachi Vantara’s Head of Product Marketing — Lumada Software, opined that “we’re moving towards this modern operating model where we see sort of business and IT teams coming really close together,” and explained the new Lumada releases aim to “move towards that direction for business users.”
Beyond those high-level visionary statements, drilling down into the capabilities of the new releases reveals a lot of substance.
Data Governance, Quality and Integration
On the Lumada DataOps side, Hitachi Vantara is pushing out new versions of its data catalog and data integration products. In a fashion not dissimilar from Alteryx’s new Analytics Cloud release which I recently covered, this Lumada DataOps release consolidates technologies from several acquired companies.
Also read: Hitachi Vantara Launches a Cloud Native DataOps Suite
For example, Lumada Data Catalog had been largely based on technology gained from Hitachi Vantara’s April 2020 acquisition of Waterline Data. This new v7.0 release layers on a UI refresh and sophisticated data quality capabilities picked up in Hitachi Vantara’s acquisition of Io-Tahoe in June of 2021. The result is a data catalog that can assess data quality against business glossary terms, rather than just physical data columns.
Screenshot of Hitachi Vantara’s new Lumada Data Catalog release, showing business glossary, data quality and data lineage features
There’s good synergy here, as the Io-Tahoe-derived data quality capabilities leverage machine learning-driven “fingerprinting” (data classification and tagging) capabilities from the Waterline side. Lumada can now also connect to the Collibra Governance Center, allowing data tracked there to be tagged and fingerprinted by Lumada Data Catalog.
The data integration story revolves around the v9.3 release of Pentaho Data Integration (Pentaho itself was acquired by Hitachi in 2015). 9.3 is the cloud-savvy release, both in terms of where the product can run, as well as the data sources it can connect to, including Snowflake, MongoDB Atlas, Teradata, Elastic Search 7.x and IBM MQ 9.2.
Heavy Industry
On the IIoT side, Lumada Industrial DataOps brings new digital twin features, a machine learning (ML) service that includes pre-trained ML models for specific industrial domain use cases, and integration with Lumada DataOps, all of which bring about IT/OT convergence.
Hitachi Vantara cites an extremely interesting case study wherein Disney Parks and Resorts is using Lumada Edge Intelligence with Lumada Industrial DataOps for predictive maintenance on several rides in their parks across the globe. Hitachi Vantara says the solution performs anomaly detection using digital twin simulations and ML services to predict maintenance issues almost 48 hours before they might occur. The partnership is apparently so strong that Hitachi Vantara is Disney’s Official Ride and Show analytics provider.
All in the Family
Hitachi, Ltd. boasts over a century of history and gobs of experience working in industrial environments. Hitachi Vantara came into being in 2017 and has fortified its homegrown IIoT and analytics platform with technology acquired from several innovative startups. The combination lets it proffer an analytics platform that can function on a standalone basis but is especially applicable to industrial data use cases. To appreciate the value, compare this to the way SAP or Oracle provide analytics platforms geared to business application and transactional data. With so many pure tech-focused startups out there for so long, it’s positive and unsurprising to see them consolidate, often in service of enterprise and industrial implementations.
Updates to Lumada DataOps’ Data Catalog and Pentaho 9.3 are available now. Lumada Industrial DataOps software will be available at the end of April.
Disclosure: Andrew Brust is the principal at Blue Badge Insights, a research, strategy and advisory firm serving data and analytics software companies, solution providers and customers. Io-Tahoe was a Blue Badge Insights customer from 2017 to 2018.