Hitachi Digital Services: "always-on" resilience for cloud workloads, mission-critical systems, and enterprise AI

PAC had the opportunity to exchange with Hitachi Digital Services about their cloud services, engineering, and AI offering, and about the integration with GlobalLogic.

Hitachi Group & Hitachi Digital Services 

Hitachi Digital Services (HDS) is part of the global Hitachi Group conglomerate with 269,000 employees in 70+ countries. The company’s history is marked by R&D, engineering, integration, automation, and operations excellence in operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT), as well as IT/OT convergence, in mission-critical industries like mobility (e.g., automotive and railways), energy, and industrial. The group’s business is structured into three main business areas: Green Energy & Mobility, Connective Industries, and Digital.

Integration of Hitachi Digital Services and GlobalLogic

Hitachi announced it was going to integrate its subsidiaries GlobalLogic and Hitachi Digital Services (HDS) in a new digital organization. The digital engineering company GlobalLogic was acquired in 2021 for $9.6bn; HDS is Hitachi’s cloud, data, and IoT services division. The new entity is expected to significantly strengthen its end-to-end digital engineering capabilities with a workforce of more than 20,000 engineers.

By combining GlobalLogic’s strengths in product strategy, software engineering, and AI with HDS’s capabilities in cloud modernization, reliability engineering, and managed operations, the new organization will address evolving client needs for scalable, resilient digital solutions. The integrated organization will also support the development of a unified AI Factory.

Leveraging these capabilities and the domain knowledge Hitachi Group has built in its OT and product areas, its “Customer Zero” approach (Hitachi is always the pilot customer) will also drive internal digitalization.

Target markets

Focused go-to-market regions are the Americas (USA, Canada), Europe (UK, Germany, Spain), and APAC (Singapore, Malaysia, India), with global delivery centers in India, Vietnam, and Portugal.

In addition to horizontal portfolio elements, focus industry sectors are targeted with tailored industry solutions, such as Automotive & Transportation with Fleet Management, Passenger Safety, Rail Operations, and Smart Airport; Manufacturing with Manufacturing Insights, Asset Management, and Supply Chain Intelligence; Energy & Utilities with Grid Intelligence and Field Service Management; Banking, Finance & Insurance with Fraud Intelligence, Risk Analytics, and ESG Reporting; and Life Sciences & Healthcare with solutions like Digital Care and Operations, Bed Optimization, and Patient Scheduling.

Edge-to-outcome approach

HDS offers a comprehensive portfolio of Cloud Services, including Cloud Migration, App Modernization, and Managed Services. It can draw on 1,500+ Cloud and App Modernization projects, 1,500+ Oracle projects, and 1,500+ SAP projects, for instance. The company’s Cloud Centers of Excellence (CoE) bundle assets, capabilities, delivery, and partnerships with platform and technology vendors; dedicated CoEs for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each focus on specific business areas.

A major differentiator for the company is its background as part of the Hitachi Group, which allows it to combine deep OT assets, advanced analytics, and scalable IT delivery to transform asset-heavy industries. Its deep OT systems experience, embedded systems heritage, and agentic AI capabilities allow it to operate not just in the cloud but also at the edge.

HDS’s Unified Engineering Model brings together software engineering and manage & sustain services through their unique service offering Hitachi Application Reliability Centers (HARC). The company’s edge-to-outcome approach spans hardware, cloud, applications, and operations and focuses on connecting data generated at the OT edge (machines, sensors, devices) to IT systems (cloud) to generate relevant business outcomes by combining data management, AI, and industry expertise.

Some examples of business outcomes:

• A large pharmaceutical manufacturer achieved 40% cost reduction through smart data management and FinOps strategies.
• A major telecom company reduced time-to-market for new service launches by 50% by implementing a big data lake solution that integrates post-merger data from systems across two entities.
• A large global telecom company built a highly secured landing zone in AWS’s Gov Cloud with FedRamp compliance along with NIST security and compliance controls for rolling out services for Federal Customers.

Hitachi Application Reliability Center (HARC)

A key component of HDS’s delivery proposition is its Hitachi Application Reliability Center (HARC) solution offering, which brings together teams of industry and cloud experts as well as tools and methodologies to design, build, and operate critical systems.

The integrated delivery framework establishes Labs model to engineer applications for customers that are highly resilient (fault-aware and fault-tolerant), secure, and cost-optimized. HARC achieves this through a combination of trained, full-stack engineers/ product managers, site reliability engineers, enhanced product engineering methodology, and purpose-built tools to automate and accelerate development.

Some key features of HARC:

• Instead of addressing failure points reactively, it adopts FMEA principles (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) used in mission-critical systems to design and develop fault-aware and fault-tolerant systems.
• Focus on cost-effective design.
• Focus on embedding security and compliance controls.
• Production readiness and release management processes are designed for an “always-on” business with zero downtime.
• In cloud operations, an integrated cloud workload management covers infrastructure, applications, and data.
• The operating model follows a product engineering approach where Dev and Ops share an integrated backlog of application and reliability features.
• Incident management is based on automated, ML-infused incident routing to the directly responsible individual (DRI), instead of traditional incident escalation.
• AI/ML-based Observability Robotics supports automated correlation and root cause analysis.

HARC for AI: extended HARC to manage AI workloads

At its launch in 2022, HARC was positioned as an offering that reimagines operations through an engineering-led philosophy.

Building on more than 20 years of experience in AI technology, two offerings were launched in 2024:

• R2O2.ai is a framework for defining the development and deployment of scalable, enterprise-grade AI workloads in a reliable, responsible, observable, and optimal manner.
• HARC for AI is a managed services layer with an engineering-led approach that operationalizes AI systems, ensuring that AI systems are always-on, cost-optimized, and production-ready.

HARC Agents

In mid-2025, in view of the rapid technological advancements in agentic AI, Hitachi launched HARC Agents, a unified agentic operating framework that combines four primary AI services from Hitachi: in addition to the aforementioned R2O2.ai and HARC for AI, it includes Agent Library and Agent Management System.

• Agent Library is a library of pre-built, interconnected agentic AI agents; it includes over 200 agents sourced corporate-wide from Hitachi’s group companies. Notably, the agents cover six key domains:
  • Industrial AI (vertical-specific use cases)
  • Operations AI
  • Engineering AI
  • Analytical AI
  • Security AI
  • Cloud AI

The Agent Library will continue to grow as new agents are developed to support internal and external customer project needs.

• Together with HARC Agents, HDS released Agent Management System, a unified control layer for securing and observing AI agents across diverse Agentic AI platforms. It is a modular platform designed to quickly develop, deploy, and oversee autonomous AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, and operating within both IT and OT environments. The unified visibility, governance, and lifecycle management are meant to ensure secure, scalable, and flexible agent deployment across enterprise environments.

Conclusion

Modernization and transformation initiatives in asset-heavy sectors such as energy, telecom, transportation, and manufacturing are increasingly designed as data-centric projects, not only in order to make the infrastructure itself smarter and more autonomous, but also to make OT data available for value-adding insights – not least for (agentic) AI use cases.

HDS’s deep domain expertise and heritage in OT and IT, as well as its comprehensive approach, which combines AI, edge and cloud computing, and engineering and operations services to achieve measurable outcomes and “always-on” resilience, places it in an interesting position to support organizations in mission-critical sectors.