Cisco, Hitachi Vantara Team On XaaS, Hybrid Cloud Managed Services

“Our goal is to bring [our technology] together with the Cisco stack and then be able to provide a full service, consumption-based pricing suite of infrastructure capabilities,” Jeb Horton, SVP of global services for Hitachi Vantara, tells CRN.

Tech giant Cisco Systems and Hitachi Vantara are once again joining forces, this time, to address ongoing enterprise data management challenges.

The latest joint hybrid cloud service offering, Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud, will help enterprises and channel partners as they adopt cloud services, while also keeping cost, flexibility and security in mind, the two companies said.

Hitachi EverFlex is the company’s everything-as-a-service (XaaS) portfolio that includes storage as a service, data protection as a service and infrastructure as a service. Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud combining Hitachi Vantara’s core storage offerings, infrastructure, managed services, and hybrid cloud management with Cisco’s expertise in networking and computing. This offering gives businesses the same experience whether used on-premises or in the cloud, according to Santa Clara, Calif.-based Hitachi Vantara.

“Our goal is to bring [our technology] together with the Cisco stack and then be able to provide a full service, consumption-based pricing suite of infrastructure capabilities,” said Jeb Horton, senior vice president of global services for Hitachi Vantara, the data storage, infrastructure, and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd.

The offering links together several platforms from both companies, including Hitachi Infrastructure Orchestration as a Service (HIOaaS) and Cisco Intersight, the company’s infrastructure management platform. It also includes hardware from Cisco, including the Catalyst and Nexus switch series.

Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud is very much aligned with Cisco’s own as a service push, an effort that the company has been promoting since its Cisco Plus strategy was unveiled in 2021, said Alexandra Zagury, vice president of partner managed services and as-a-service sales for Cisco.

“It’s really a strategy where we really go to market with partners,” she said.

Cisco and Hitachi have been partners for about 20 years and Hitachi is bringing “the full as a service experience” through its EverFlex consumption model, Zagury said.

“We both [also] invested in some very unique integrations into our products, which really differentiates the outcome for our customers and provides that full stack consumption model,” she said.

Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud, which can be customized, is available now through Hitachi Vantara’s partner ecosystem, via a consumption-based, pay-per-use model, said Horton (pictured above).

“Our expectation is this will run 100 percent through partners [and] we want to give our partners the opportunity to white label what we’re doing and fold it into whatever offerings they may have,” Horton said.

A Focus on Managed Services

Cisco, thanks to its own focus on managed services and selling managed offerings through partners, was a natural fit as a partner for Hitachi Vantara when it began upscaling its own efforts around networking, compute and storage managed services and XaaS practice, Horton said.

“We were simply buying someone’s servers and someone’s switches and start putting it all together, which worked for our customers, but it really lacked the power of a partnership,” he said. “We’ve spent the last six months working on how we can bring this partnership together.”

Cisco in 2023 predicted that 46 percent of its total addressable market -- representing about $161 billion -- would be sold as a managed service by 2027, a figure that hasn’t wavered, Zagury said.

“This is part of the trend of our customers wanting to consume outcomes and experiences,” she said. “If you look across all the architectures, when it comes to data center, that is the first market that has moved to the managed, as a service strategy. Our customers are not only looking at consuming everything from a services perspective, but they’re also looking at those consumption models. And that’s why Hitachi’s EverFlex solution really allows for that consumption model across our technology and Hitachi’s technology.”