Hitachi Vantara believes that in a cloud-based world, applications need to be more reliable—so it’s opened a new center in Dallas that will help companies make that happen. The new Hitachi Application Reliability Center is Hitachi Vantara’s first physical cloud and engineering “center of excellence” in North America, and only the second of its kind in the world, the company says.

The center is designed to help clients modernize their IT operations by taking an agile, engineering-led approach. Worldwide, the HARC program expects to add more than 600 jobs, including 120 in Dallas by 2025.

“We opened our first Reliability Center in Hyderabad, India, with a mission to modernize cloud workload management and integrate it into modern engineering methodology,” Frisco-based Premkumar Balasubramanian, SVP and CTO of Hitachi Vantara’s digital solutions business, wrote on LinkedIn after the Hyperabad opening three months ago. 

Now—with yesterday’s opening of the world’s second HARC in Dallas—Balasubramanian says his company aims to help realize the cloud’s potential in a bold new way.

Fulfilling a key promise of the cloud

“A key promise of the cloud is the agility to seamlessly deploy new software, experiences and revenue streams,” Balasubramanian said in a statement this week. “With HARC, we’re helping our clients move to the cloud strategically by designing for reliability and optimizing for costs. By looking at cloud through the lenses of product engineering, reliability, automation, DevOps, FinOps, and security, we’re able to pull the right lever for each organization to not only move to, but thrive on the cloud.” 

Already employing nearly 400 in DFW

Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Hitachi Vantara has already been operating in Dallas for almost 22 years. It currently employs nearly 400 people within the DFW area.

Locating the new HARC here would seem to make sense not just because of the company’s existing presence here, but because Dallas is one of the world’s largest datacenter and cloud markets—and momentum in North Texas is only increasing. A data center market flash from Dallas-based commercial real estate giant CBRE showed that Dallas had “the most active quarter of leasing of all time” in Q4 2021. 

That would seem to fit what Hitachi Vantara is offering as “one of the world’s leading providers of data infrastructure as well as consulting expertise and services for cloud, applications, and digital engineering.”

HARC services create “a continuous feedback loop” that reduces costs “by 35%”

So how will the new HARC in Dallas help companies make their applications more reliable? First, the company says its services go beyond simply managing an application “to help create an integrated software engineering organization that optimizes the design and running of applications across the lifecycle.”

HARC’s key move is collapsing traditional silos between engineering and operations. It engineers applications and workloads at the development phase to run on the cloud. Then, a “continuous feedback loop between product engineering, DevOps, and ITOps” ensures that workloads are optimized for the cloud.

The result: Hitachi Vantara says HARC reduces total operations costs by 35%, while removing unnecessary risks and complexity—and delivering always-on cloud workloads.

Why this solution is needed

A full 85% of respondents to a recent Harvard Business Review–Analytic Services survey say their organizations use at least two clouds—and 25% are using five or more clouds. In this enterprise “race to the cloud,” most companies see room for improvement: 77% of those surveyed say their organizations “need to improve cloud management.” But only 27% have created a cloud center for excellence to coordinate and share best practices, Hitachi Vantara says.

‘Not for the faint of heart’

Russell Skingsley

“The road to the data-driven enterprise is not for the faint of heart,” says a recent Hitachi Vantara blog post.  

Russell Skingsley, Hitachi Vantara’s Global VP of technical sales, is featured in a Q&A in the post and reveals the big “why” behind it all: 

“Hitachi Vantara has developed a path forward that combines cloud-ready infrastructure, cloud consulting, and managed services to optimize applications for resiliency and performance, and automated dataops innovations. This holistic approach establishes a protected digital core that stretches from the data center, through the cloud, to the edge.”

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