Hitachi Data Systems Turns Business Data
Into Business Opportunity.

ACW Services in Hong Kong develops cloud-based services for critical business applications and information management. With access to these services through simple subscriptions, the clients of ACW Services can now use sophisticated computing that was unaffordable to them before. This is a significant competitive advantage for these clients, many of whom compete with large multinational corporations that have significant financial resources and sophisticated in-house computing infrastructures. As a result, ACW clients can innovate faster and better to bring to their customers a flow of innovative products and services that was not possible before.

Illumination Mac Guff, a movie studio in Paris, creates information in the form of movies such as The Lorax. They have developed an agile information management system to support hundreds of artists and render 90TB of computer graphics. The system lets creativity flow faster and makes movies that are closer to the artists' original innovative vision.

TSYS, a credit card processing company in Columbus, GA, synthesizes information about cardholders' experiences across all of their services and client-facing websites. The company uses this information to develop and assess the innovative new services it offers to financial institutions and cardholders.

To manage their investments, financial fund managers need to identify and react to emerging events in the world. Often the earliest indications are through social media such as Twitter, but manual tracking and interpretation of the variety and volume of these messages is close to impossible. The Hitachi Financial Services group in Japan has built an innovative solution that performs sentiment analysis of social media in real time and at great volume. The system continuously yields the status of positive and negative sentiment for tracked companies and offers early and usable intelligence for fund managers.

EMIEW2, a service robot by Hitachi, showcases innovation for the real world. Through tight integration of data streams, and sophisticated, real-time analysis, the robot has impressive capabilities. For example, its visual recognition lets it greet visitors by name, guide them to their destination, and even locate missing items. Its advanced voice recognition and analysis let it handle noisy environments and follow simultaneous conversations. Many of its technologies are part of Hitachi research in intelligent analysis of complex media: image, video, audio and text.

Hitachi Business Microscope is an innovative system that analyzes human behavior by using sensors placed in an environment and worn by people. Understanding the subtleties of human interaction can yield deep and often surprising insight. One retailer monitored customer activity and realized a 15% increase in sales per customer by repositioning sales staff. In another example, managers found that call center sales productivity increased when colleagues interacted with each other during breaks. Office planners can leverage this technology to better understand and support human traffic flow and use of their buildings.

Development of effective fertilizers and crop management techniques used to take several seasons to complete. Dependence on actual crop yield has usually meant experimenting with whole fields of plants and waiting until the end of a season to measure results. However, with innovative Hitachi technologies, these results are available with far fewer plants and within weeks. With insights derived from bio sensors on the ground, satellite imagery and crop simulation models, researchers can analyze crop health and estimate yield. As a result, they can optimize the timing and sequence of harvests to improve crop quality, reducing the environmental load.

Most call center interactions are recorded, transcribed and stored. Frequently these text records are mined for key words that indicate frequent issues, but are limited to emotionless transcripts. To close this gap, Hitachi is exploring native voice analysis that identifies sentiment in the spoken word. With innovative analysis of intonation, cadence and word choices, the analysis software can quickly identify the calls that are going well and those that are not. This nuanced information can be used to escalate and resolve customer satisfaction issues more quickly and effectively – sometimes during the customer's first call.

For better insight into product quality and customer satisfaction, Hitachi product development teams in Japan are working with SAP on an innovative system that mines large stores of various kinds of data. The system combines product lifecycle, sales and financial data from the SAP transactional systems (structured, business data), with sentiment analysis from customer calls (human-generated data), and system logs generated by the Hitachi systems themselves (machine-generated data). Analyzed in aggregate, this data will provide new levels of insight and a correlated 360 degree view that is visualized through SAP HANA. The results will enable more proactive maintenance, better root cause analysis, identification of recurring issues, and higher satisfaction for Hitachi customers.

Tokyo Stock Exchange launched a high-speed index service in 2011 in collaboration with Hitachi. Using real-time Hitachi streaming data technologies, the new index captures stock fluctuations in 1/100th of the time of the previous service. Because the index reflects immediately actionable best quotes, investors can trade with far less tracking error, or deviation from the index. The real-time ingestion and analysis engine developed by Hitachi is now used in many other applications of real-time machine data, including on-demand maintenance, seismic telemetry, and construction equipment tracking.

This white paper examines how Hitachi considers the specific needs of various industries as we work to accelerate innovation and build a sustainable society. By collaborating among these different types of infrastructure and social systems, Hitachi further harnesses the power of data to create new services and social innovations. Our endeavors to create new possibilities for people and companies are becoming more and more important for society.

To achieve a sustainable society, Hitachi aims to bring the world’s ecosystems and people into harmony, reducing the load on the environment, and increasing comfort, safety, convenience and enjoyment. Hitachi believes that social infrastructure systems should play a role in achieving these goals. We have incorporated these goals into the IT infrastructure we have been building over many years.