Collaborative Relationship in Technology, Services and Support, and Sales and Marketing Strengthen Alliance
TOKYO, Japan and REDWOOD SHORES, California, U.S.A., February 12, 2003 — Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT) and Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, with Oracle Corporation and Oracle Corp. Japan, today announced they plan to expand collaboration in key business areas: technology, services and support, and sales and marketing. By creating a tighter relationship in these business areas and expanding integrated solutions built on Hitachi Freedom Storage™ systems and Oracle information management software, Hitachi and Oracle can provide their common customers worldwide with industry-leading data storage solutions.
"Following the TrueNorth™ vision, Hitachi has been strengthening its collaboration with leading software and hardware vendors in order to provide industry-leading solutions and satisfy customers' needs," said Ikuo Kimura, COO, Hitachi Information and Telecommunication Group.
"By promoting harmonization of the cutting-edge technologies of both Hitachi and Oracle, we can provide enhanced data storage solutions globally. Also, we expect our combined efforts to provide our customers with world-class service to satisfy growing business needs in their mission-critical storage environment. By working together, Oracle and Hitachi can continue to provide our mutual customers with proven solutions and services for their data storage environments."
"We are excited about our plans to grow our collaboration with Hitachi," said Doug Kennedy, vice president, Platform Alliances, System Platforms Division, Oracle. "Data storage solutions have gotten more complex and our customers want infrastructures that are simpler, faster, and easier to manage. We believe Hitachi tells a compelling global story; continuing to work with Hitachi is important to Oracle to help ensure we meet the growing needs of our joint customers."
Technology
Hitachi and Oracle plan to continue working closely together on the development of a number of technologies that drive tighter product integration and enhanced customer services. Hitachi and Oracle have worked together to develop the Hitachi DB Discovery for Oracle. This software library is plugged into Oracle File Mapping, Oracle's file topology extraction functionality, enabling database administrators to visually identify and extract information about Oracle datafile locations within Hitachi Freedom Storage systems. The Hitachi DB Discovery for Oracle is scheduled to be available from Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems worldwide in February 2003. As a part of Oracle's Backup Solution Program, Hitachi and Oracle plan to develop other solution technologies, which will enable integration between Oracle's Recovery Manager interface and the Hitachi ShadowImage™ replication function of Hitachi Freedom Storage systems, reducing the complexity and usual time window required for petabyte-class online backup and recovery operations.
In addition to developing new technologies and products, Hitachi and Oracle are working together to help ensure interoperability of their products and provide customers with higher levels of reliability and performance. The two companies have worked to verify compatibility between Hitachi Freedom Storage systems and Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. Through the technical and marketing programs of Oracle Storage Compatibility Program (OSCP), Hitachi and Oracle have also successfully completed the validation testing for the operation of Snapshot (Split-Mirroring) with Hitachi ShadowImage and Remote Mirroring functionality with Hitachi TrueCopy™ on Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning 9900™ V Series and Thunder 9500™ V Series systems.
Services and Support
In order to provide seamless support services for mutual customers worldwide, Hitachi and Oracle have agreed to join forces to enhance their support services. By cooperatively providing services for customers, Hitachi and Oracle can shorten response time, decrease downtime, increase manageability, and lower costs. This builds on technologies like Hitachi "DB Validator", which is a data integrity technology for Oracle Database systems that prevents corrupted data from reaching the networked storage disk system and alerts both database and storage system administrators of a potential issue. Hitachi and Oracle also plan to explore providing joint proactive service solutions, which are collaborative services for both database and storage environments focused on helping joint customers improve system availability and performance while reducing total cost of ownership.
Sales and Marketing
Hitachi and Oracle Japan have conducted joint sales and marketing activities in Japan based on leveraging the "SAN Solution Technology Center", a center established by both companies for the purpose of developing and demonstrating the value and benefit of utilizing their integrated solutions when deploying mission critical systems. The companies plan to expand this sales and marketing collaboration in Japan worldwide, beginning with China. The companies also plan to introduce a joint reference model, which would enable both Hitachi and Oracle to develop and provide leading integrated storage solutions to their customers.
"Hitachi Data Systems is committed to working closely with our partners in order to provide customers with the highest quality, open storage solutions in the industry," said Dave Roberson, president and COO, Hitachi Data Systems. "By enhancing our relationship with Oracle, we enable our joint customers to enjoy the maximum business benefits of tighter integration between our market-leading products and higher levels of services and support worldwide."
"Our commitment to being the top cellular choice for young people in the U.S. means delivering a consistently outstanding level of personal service," said Virgin Mobile USA chief information officer, Mike Parks. "Reliable and fast access to our customers' data is critical to our day-to-day business. The close relationship between Hitachi, Hitachi Data Systems, and Oracle, as well as their commitment to supporting our business objectives, confirms that we chose the right combination of storage systems and data management applications for our vital information."
"Our mission is to provide safe and smooth train service for customers, and we have been building and enhancing the Integrated Railway Operation System (IROS) for the mission", said Toru Yagi, Manager of System Development Department, JR East Japan Information Systems Company. "Our latest system was built on Hitachi storage and Oracle9i Real Application Clusters, and this platform allowed for more stable operation with higher performance than ever before. I expect that the collaboration of Hitachi and Oracle will help us to deliver our system's increasing requirements more quickly and completely."
Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company, with approximately 320,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2001 (ended March 31, 2002) consolidated sales totaled 7,994 billion yen ($60.1 billion*). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors, including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's Web site at http://www.hitachi.com.
Hitachi Data Systems is committed to enabling organizations worldwide to exploit the full potential of information. By following and deploying our TrueNorth strategy, we provide customers with a broad range of storage solutions to simplify, protect and optimize their information infrastructures. Our offerings include enterprise and modular storage systems and software, professional services, fully complemented by best-of-breed products through industry alliances.
With 2,700 employees, Hitachi Data Systems conducts business through direct sales and resellers in the public, government and private sectors in over 170 countries and regions on six continents. Its customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.hds.com.
Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.oracle.com.
Contacts:
Jodi Reinman, Hitachi Data Systems, (408) 970-1050, jodi.reinman@hds.com
LaTisha Ephraim, Oracle Corp., (650) 506-9322, latisha.ephraim@oracle.com
Hitachi Freedom Storage and TrueNorth are registered trademarks of Hitachi Data Systems.
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.
All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.
© Hitachi Data Systems is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd.
Newsroom
