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 Leader Talk: In Conversation with N S Kumar, Chief Delivery Officer, Hitachi Digital Services
Leader Talk: In Conversation with N S Kumar, Chief Delivery Officer, Hitachi Digital Services

October 28, 2024

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By continuing to innovate, we stay ahead of the curve, serving our customers better and meeting their future demands.

 

Q: Please describe your experience and your current role at Hitachi Digital Services.

As the Chief Delivery Officer at Hitachi Digital Services, I lead our global delivery organization. My role involves ensuring that we deliver high-quality services across these areas, leveraging our unique assets and expertise to meet the evolving needs of our customers.

Before joining Hitachi, I had a long and distinguished career at Wipro, where I held several delivery leadership roles across various industries, including manufacturing, hi-tech, automotive, and BFSI. This extensive experience has provided me with a deep understanding of diverse operational landscapes. I have worked globally, with significant stints in the USA, Singapore, and India. Most recently, I served as the Chief Operating Officer for the Americas, where I was responsible for delivery and operations across four key industry verticals.

Q: Enterprise IT services spending is stabilizing in 2024, with little to no growth in budgets, however, digital spending continues to rise. How prepared is Hitachi Digital Services to navigate the constrained IT spending environment?

Our strategy involves a focused approach focusing on a select few key practices. By developing deep expertise within these areas, we can create significant differentiation in the market. We’ve identified six industry verticals where we aim to provide specialized solutions. By building accelerators that directly address specific digital challenges, we can offer integrated, cloud-based solutions that are delivered quickly and efficiently. Today’s customers are looking for solutions that not only meet their immediate needs but are also agile enough to adapt to future demands. We believe that this focused strategy positions us well to navigate the current landscape.

Q:  With the new entity coming into existence, are you focused on following a global delivery model vs offshoring? How are you expanding your geo footprint from a delivery standpoint?

We already have a strong global presence with delivery centers in India, Vietnam, and Portugal. India serves as our primary offshoring location, housing centers in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Pune, allowing us to tap into a large talent pool. In Vietnam, we leverage IT and IoT skills, particularly with bilingual resources who can cater to our Japanese clientele. Our center in Portugal supports our EMEA operations, offering compliance and language skills, particularly in areas like data science and analytics. As we look ahead, we aim to further strengthen these centers to meet future needs, focusing on enhancing our capabilities in areas like AI and machine learning. Currently, we do not have plans to open new locations in other regions but are committed to maximizing the potential of our existing centers.

Q: Could you briefly talk about HARC (Hitachi Application Reliability Centers) and their role in managed services. How do these centers help expedite the modernization and scaling-up efforts of Hitachi Digital Services clients?

HARC, an integral part of all our Managed services, is a unified framework and operating model that focuses on helping clients in transforming both ‘build and sustenance’ of enterprise applications with modern engineering practices such as SRE, Resiliency, AIOps and FinOps. HARC enables product engineering teams to build applications with ‘Design for reliability’, ‘Design for security’ and ‘Cost conscious coding’ practices to proactively ensure that application features are released to production faster and consistently to meet all business requirements and be ‘always-on’.  On the sustenance side, HARC then leverages SRE best practices, Increased Automation and AI/ML based insights with both best-in-class tools from the market and homegrown accelerators to drive efficiencies and cost optimization to generate more business value by spending less while keeping the applications reliable, scalable and secure.

Q: Traditionally, you have had strong offerings in Industry 4.0, such as in digital manufacturing, IoT, and similar areas. How have you grown your IT-OT capabilities to match the evolving needs of the industrial enterprises? 

Hitachi has been a pioneer, especially in asset-heavy industries such as manufacturing, rail, and energy, having brought to market a wide range of innovative and complex products and technologies over its 110+ years of existence. We continue to leverage this legacy and further strengthen our offerings around Industry 4.0. As we pivot towards the 5th industrial revolution, or the ‘Cognitive Era,’ we focus on solutions that bring further intelligence to the ‘Edge.’ We are collaborating with industry leaders, such as Nvidia, to deliver cutting-edge digital solutions leveraging artificial intelligence for rail infrastructure. We combine industrial robotics with advanced computer vision capabilities to provide new and innovative solutions that enhance quality inspection for manufacturers. We are building digital twins for production scheduling and optimization in complex mining operations. Additionally, we are introducing generative AI solutions in the energy and mobility sectors.

Over the past few years, we have been assisting one of our clients, a leading transportation company, in transforming their operations, particularly in fleet management. We have been using AI to proactively diagnose faults based on data from a vehicle’s onboard IoT sensors, identifying maintenance needs before they arise. This has significantly increased the time the fleet is on the road, positively impacting the business. Now, we are helping them transition to the next phase of operations transformation with guided repair solutions leveraging generative AI. Using years of maintenance data, we are now able to diagnose faults and recommend repairs, further increasing the efficiency of fleet operations.

By continuing to innovate, we stay ahead of the curve, serving our customers better and meeting their future demands.

Q: India is a key growth driver for global IT service providers like you, led by rapid demand of enterprise apps, and cloud in enterprise and mid-market segments arising from the region. How well prepared are you to tap into this opportunity?

We’ve pinpointed three primary focus areas within the Indian market. First, our IT/OT solutions for rail projects are expanding, particularly in light of the growing metro initiatives across various cities. We are collaborating with Hitachi Rail on projects such as the Chennai Metro and the Western Corridor Rail network. Second, we’re focusing on our clients' captive centers in India, where we can offer tailored services that align with their operational goals. This allows us to deepen our relationships with key clients while leveraging local expertise. Lastly, our video intelligence platform has gained traction in public infrastructure projects, including temples and stadiums, where safety and operational efficiency are paramount. We believe that our targeted strategies, combined with our domain expertise and innovative assets, will drive significant growth in the Indian market moving forward.

Q: We look forward to seeing how Hitachi Digital Services continues to evolve in the coming years. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I appreciate the opportunity to discuss our vision and strategies. We remain committed to investing in solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers, particularly in sustainability and digital transformation. Our focus on collaboration and innovation will be key to our success, and we look forward to making a meaningful impact in the industry. The future is bright, and we’re excited about the opportunities ahead.

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