The story
Founded by Namihei Odaira in 1980.1
Origin as Itel
Itel was founded in 1967 by Peter Redfield and Gary Friedman as an equipment leasing company and initially focused on leasing IBM mainframes. Through creative financial arrangements and investments, Itel began to lease IBM mainframes to customers at lower costs, which led to Itel ranking second to IBM in revenues.
In 1977, a joint venture between National Semiconductor and Hitachi formed, and was contracted by Itel to manufacture IBM-compatible mainframes branded as Advanced Systems. After initial success shipping 200 such systems and net profits of $73 million, Itel increased investments and personnel to market its Advanced Systems brand. When Itel requested lower prices to compete with IBM, the CEO of National Semiconductor Charlie Sporck, persuaded Itel to commit to long-term contracts with National Semiconductor and Hitachi.
National Semiconductor takes over Advanced Systems
When news leaked that IBM was releasing a superior line of computers, customers held back purchases of Itel goods, causing Itel's inventory to build up drastically. Hitachi agreed to Itel's request to cut back on shipment, but National Semiconductor insisted that National had blackmailed Itel. In 1979, Redfield was forced to resign as CEO. National Semiconductor took over Itel Advanced Systems' sales and marketing divisions.
National Semiconductor renamed the National Advanced Systems (NAS) division, assembling and selling IBM-compatibles where the central processing unit (CPU) was imported from Hitachi. National and Hitachi relied upon IBM's gradual and restrained roll-out of newer models to support IBM's technology and market share, which supported NAS's occasional successes.
NAS began shipping its AS/9000 DPC plug compatible mainframes in late 1981. IBM, however, had invested and obtained success in semiconductor technologies which enabled them to build powerful computers at lower costs. Meanwhile, the mainframe market was in decline as mini and microcomputers, and the Unix operating system gained popularity. Mainframe makers such as Sperry, Honeywell, Burroughs, NCR and Control Data were gradually being forced out of the mainframe market. Both NAS and Amdahl (the other IBM plug-compatible mainframe maker), faced technological and sales pressure from IBM.
National Semiconductor and its subsidiary NAS were sued in 1983 by IBM for $2.5 billion on charges of using computer technology secrets stolen from IBM, as the result of an investigation by the United States Government into National's collaboration with Hitachi. Hitachi settled with IBM and licensed the mainframe operating system software from IBM. In 1983, NAS ceased manufacturing its line of mainframes (which had Hitachi processors) and became a reseller of Hitachi's mainframe and data storage products.
HDS (1989)
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) was founded in 1989 when Hitachi and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) acquired National Advanced Systems (NAS) from National Semiconductor and renamed it Hitachi Data Systems. Before that, the origins of the company had a history that stretched back to Itel, an early player in the mainframe market. Intel's Computer Products Group sold National Semiconductors' IBM plug compatible mainframes. In 1979 National Semiconductor took over Itel and formed National Advanced Systems (NAS). NAS shifted from manufacturing mainframes and began marketing systems from Hitachi. In 1999, Hitachi bought out EDS's share, and HDS became a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi. For many years, HDS sold Hitachi IBM plug-compatible mainframes and storage systems, but in 2000, it exited the mainframe business and shifted its focus to enterprise storage.
Joint venture of Hitachi and EDS
On February 28, 1989, National Semiconductor and Hitachi announced their agreement that Hitachi and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) would jointly acquire NAS for $398 million in cash, of which Hitachi would own 80%. Memorex Telex and National had earlier, on January 10, 1989, announced plans on a joint venture "under which each company would own half of the unit and National would get $250 million plus four million shares of Memorex Telex". However, National proceeded to negotiate with Hitachi after Memorex's offer expired as National had felt that the Hitachi–EDS offer was a better deal as it entailed no further financial obligation or commitment on the part of National after the sale besides reaping a pre-tax profit of $200 million from the sale. By that time, Memorex Telex was able to arrange financing for the deal, but National had already accepted the Hitachi–EDS deal.
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The acquisition was envisaged to provide Hitachi with a better presence in the United States to compete with IBM. The entity was renamed Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).
EDS stake
On January 29, 1999, Hitachi announced it would take over EDS' stake in HDS, appointing Jun Naruse as CEO of its new subsidiary. Naruse was an engineer with the RAID Systems Division who was involved in developing storage systems. Having total control of the company, Hitachi infused Hitachi Data Systems with its corporate culture, ethics, and practices.
Storage
On April 6, 2000, Hitachi Data Systems announced a re-organization to focus on storage systems rather than mainframes. Shortly thereafter (June 26, 2000), the first HDS storage product was unveiled, the Freedom Storage Lightning 9900, featuring the crossbar switched architecture to interconnect memory, disks, servers, and other external devices instead of the traditional bus architecture. In addition to HDS sales, HP OEM’d and Sun resold the 9900 and succeeding generations, which had additional capabilities such as virtualization of external Hitachi and third-party storage systems to form storage pools.
In January 2001, HDS announced the Thunder 9200, a mid-range modular storage system aimed at the small and medium business market, sold mainly through resellers.
Hitachi Data Systems high-end and mid-range modular storage systems were complemented by software for storage management, content management, business continuity, replication, data protection, and IT operations.
In 2002, Hitachi acquired Comstock Systems Corp, and analysts estimated that the acquisition would lead to a 35% percent market share.
Cloud computing
HDS moved to use the term cloud computing, culminating with an announcement on October 25, 2011. In August 2014, in partnership with Avnet, HDS announced cloud partners.
Acquisitions
On February 6, 2007, Hitachi Data Systems acquired Archivas, a provider of digital archiving and content management products.
On August 20, 2010, Hitachi Data Systems acquired the intellectual property and core engineering team of ParaScale, developer of storage software which uses a clustered file system on multiple Linux servers to present a single file-storage appliance.
On September 7, 2011, Hitachi Data Systems acquired BlueArc which developed a clustered network attached storage product. It was estimated HDS had been responsible for about half of BlueArc's sales in 2010.
On February 13, 2012, Hitachi Data Systems acquired Shoden Data Systems, a provider of data center technology in South Africa and across the sub-Saharan African continent.
On September 26, 2012, Hitachi Data Systems acquired Cofio Software a provider of unified data protection and orchestration workflow software in San Diego, with engineering in Broadstone, England.
On August 10, 2014, Hitachi Data Systems acquired Sepaton, a provider of computer appliances using data deduplication.
On May 31, 2015, Hitachi Data Systems acquired oXya, a provider of services for SAP HANA from SAP.
On June 4, 2015, Hitachi Data Systems completed the acquisition of Pentaho, marketing big data and data analytics. Pentaho is part of a company-wide movement of HDS towards Social Innovation using emerging technologies, including the Internet of things.
On September 17, 2019, it was announced that Hitachi will integrate Hitachi Vantara and Hitachi Consulting to accelerate the global expansion of Hitachi's Social Innovation Business and Digital Growth. In January 2020, the integrated companies began operating under the brand Hitachi Vantara and were led by Toshiaki Tokunaga. Though not technically an acquisition, Hitachi Vantara absorbed Hitachi Consulting.
In June 2026, it sold Pentaho to LEO Software Group.
From Wikipedia’s article on Hitachi Data Systems, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5