By Cat Yong
After a tough and drawn out negotiation process spanning over a year, wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., Hitachi Systems, Ltd., has announced their joint venture (JV) with Malaysian IT solutions provider Sunway Technology Sdn. Bhd. This JV sees the formation of Hitachi Sunway Information Systems Sdn. Bhd. (HSIS).
The new operating entity headquartered in Malaysia, has subsidiaries set up across Southeast Asia in countries like Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia, with one more subsidiary in Vietnam to be formed by Q3 this year and Myanmar likely to follow suit.
Drawing upon Hitachi Systems’ strengths in IT infrastructure, network integration, operation and monitoring, data centre operation, virtualisation and cloud-based services and security and other technologies, HSIS aims to be a leading IT service provider in the region.
The regional play
Chairman and director, Masato Saito, who is also Executive Officer and Group Executive of Global Business Group at Hitachi Systems shared that Hitachi Systems is focused on providing business to the overseas market, especially since recently, many of their clients have expanded abroad. “So, now we may have 1.5% of revenue from outside Japan, but we target to increase this to 10% within 3 years.”
“This is an Asean region play. Deployment of services and offerings are to multiple countries instead of just one – this is unique. And this is what global clients want to have, so we need to have support from a very strong IT services vendor who can support them in expanding in this region,” Saito commented of the HSIS joint venture.
“We will be number one in terms of this kind of support,” he also pointed out.
Headed up by Group CEO, Cheah Kok Hoong who was formerly Group CEO of Sunway E-Systems, HSIS’ offerings are divided into Applications, Engineering Solutions and Infrastructure & Managed Services, led by senior vice presidents, Su Sing King, Ralph Tay and Joan Soh respectively.
Knowledge transfer
One of the JV’s objectives is to learn and leverage Hitachi Systems’ cloud computing and global solutions expertise in the areas of system maintenance and expansion, consulting/business design and planning, system design and construction, system introduction and installation as well as system operation and management.
Group CEO, Cheah shared, “We want to move from being just a traditional systems integrator towards managed services, data centre outsourcing, IT outsourcing and business process outsourcing. That’s the game plan.”
Cheah also said that big technology vendors had approached HSIS to be their one-stop shop on a regional-level. For example, negotiating deals and contracts on a regional basis instead of one individual country at a time.
In return, their over 800 existing customers and potential customers in Southeast Asia would have access to Hitachi Systems’ more than 20,000 professional engineers, IT strategists, systems architects, project managers, network specialists, VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, CISCO, SAP and ITIL certified specialists.
Cheah had shared in an earlier interview that clients tend to prefer single-vendor providers, or rather a one-stop shop with multi-vendor solution offerings, because “It provides ease of doing business, helping customers to support their end-to-end systems, as (a one-stop shop with multi-vendor offerings) possesses end-to-end skill sets, ability to manage the whole project and can ensure a smooth project implementation within the set timeline.”
In the press release announcing the new JV, there had been a paragraph describing that, “Hitachi Sunway Information Systems also aims to generate revenues of JPY4 billion in fiscal year 2015, in collaboration with Hitachi Asia and other Hitachi Group companies operating in Southeast Asia, and together with Sunway Technology.”
Hitachi Asia is Hitachi, Ltd.’s regional headquarters for the Asia region.
