Thread regarding Hitachi Vantara layoffs

Could anyone say anything good about this company?

Trying to figure out if there is diamond in the rough.

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| 8361 views | | 43 replies (last January 6, 2021) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+181mwjM8

43 replies (most recent on top)

I hate this holding pattern before the boom is lowered on our heads

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Post ID: @Ljzs+181mwjM8

"they need to show just enough progress to survive 2 years to get their payout while leaving us shrivelled and dried as they make their way to their newly purchased Bahamas island"

Exactly

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Post ID: @Cabf+181mwjM8

Any info on the specific teams facing cuts at the end of January? Is GSC in Boston or San Diego impacted?

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Post ID: @Cyav+181mwjM8

wow. thats a long post.

What you are saying is: we are screwed, management probably knows we are screwed, but they need to show just enough progress to survive 2 years to get their payout while leaving us shrivelled and dried as they make their way to their newly purchased Bahamas island? To enjoy the warmth of the red dwarf?

Hmm. You would probably be wildly accurate on that.

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Post ID: @Bywb+181mwjM8

@Bprr+181mwjM8
There is a lot more to what you said than you realize. I think you wandered into the actual strategy if you can call it that....lol.

GK and "coterie" as you call it, don't know much about the legacy business and view it as a cash cow that buys them some time. They wont sell it off yet. Too soon. They will spend 2021 focusing on how to fix the rest of the company.

Unfortunately that means significant surgery and a lot of pain for people like us. I dont see how most people here today will be there by the end of 2021. In fact, there is a January / February list getting cleaned up now for action.

So ... the services side. My guess (I think fairly accurate) is that they realized this part s—ed and did not have any stickiness. So it was easy to get rid of the other BS, etc. pretty easily. Now they have this new group composed of friends from the past. So far IOT is clearly a focus area but it created small ticket revenue per sale. So.. AI/ML? Given the data/database legacy of the company, it should be easy right, who better than a DB company to provide AI which runs of a lot of data and statistics? Except they are slowly realizing that may not be the case and any success here will take significant time. So the question is what else besides IOT and AI? And that is the billion dollar question. For now, cloud is key but lets not mistake where we stand today. With the db offerings from Amazon and Azure and the pure db offerings from new entrants like Snowflake, we dont really have anything that compares today or provides the hybrid (cloud + on-prem) option that these create when combined with existing in house IT for clients. In house is already covered by the legacy business, so thats not really the issue here leaving aside product staleness etc. So yes, this whole cloud thing is an option and highly lucrative, but if and only if they can chart a path to success. And that is where this lies. GK and some of the team came from the digital side of Cognizant which was supposed to be expert in cloud except the real cloud work was done by their infra team per my buddies there. Soo...dont expect these guys will know how to succeed here. My gut is they will use some of their cash to make an acquisition in this space. If you cant drive success, then buy it.

Which brings us full circle, so we now have IOT, AI in the future, some cloud action. For most people, it will be obvious that this combination is not enough to turn our ship around. So what next? And that is where we are screwed. The small actions tied to the three things above will give the Japanese folks a sense of motion, but what they will not see is that the motion leads nowhere in the end.

I see us like a red dwarf star, slowly dying away while the leadership basks in the temporary warmth of the star thinking "what great weather we have". :-(

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Post ID: @Bzdb+181mwjM8

Look, in the end GK and his coterie will make an impact on the company. It may or may not be positive for us personally and most likely it wont be.

In that sense, it pains me no end that the other BS is still around. One thing I cant get out of my head is how the Infra side has been protected with most of the old blood while the services side was stripped. It almost feels like they are planning to ringfence and sell of the Infra side and build a brand new services side with the external transplants.

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Post ID: @Bprr+181mwjM8

One good thing- whoever works here- this is The lowest point of your career. The only place to go after this is up

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Post ID: @xxpp+181mwjM8

There’s a reason Hitachi Vantara is NOT a publicly traded company because their books would reveal how unhealthy the company is operating. The push into the Cloud is going nowhere fast. The only thing holding this company up right now is from the legacy storage products that they were trying to abandon a few years ago. Selling off this company is going to happen since they are unable to make any dent in the Cloud market. The Cloud companies they bought in the past basically went into smoke in front of the mirror. Hitachi Limited is going impatient and will need to stop the bleeding of red ink.

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Post ID: @vkyu+181mwjM8

They are having a virtual holiday party at 5:00PM est. They have no mercy after telling us we need to work harder, they wants us to join the meeting on our time. FU GK.

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Post ID: @ttov+181mwjM8

Yes, tearing it down for a cheap fire sale....to Cognizant.

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Post ID: @ssck+181mwjM8

4000 is in the ballpark. Its not a done deal yet. No idea what the gameplan is but what I can think of is the first round(s) was about slimming things down to buy some cash and some time for the bigger play. If these 4K are in one area, its because GFK (F stands exactly for what you think it stands for) is F'ing around with k–ling off some assets

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Post ID: @spvv+181mwjM8

4000 would be massive. The only way that would make any sense would be some kind of merger. Any credible rumors in that area?

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Post ID: @skgg+181mwjM8

4000? Where did they number come from? That seems way too large

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Post ID: @sojz+181mwjM8

4000 is correct- 40% of the company. The strategy seems to be- shrink the company and become Hitachizant. ...great idea GK! Just kid- not a good idea. We are just circling the drain...I’m looking and you all should as well.

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Post ID: @sxnd+181mwjM8

For the big fish to survive they are k–ling small fish.

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Post ID: @qskk+181mwjM8

4000

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Post ID: @qmgk+181mwjM8

Jan 18-22? Seems pretty definitive. Any info on size compared to Oct?

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Post ID: @kjcc+181mwjM8

January 18 to Jan 22 is the designated fun week according to my friends in HR.

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Post ID: @jtkx+181mwjM8

No

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Post ID: @jwpn+181mwjM8

Hiring outside USA!!!
Hearing Layoffs In January🤔

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Post ID: @hmgd+181mwjM8

WE ARE HIRING BIG in HV!!

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Post ID: @hyku+181mwjM8

If you speak Telugu, you should be fine...

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Post ID: @earp+181mwjM8

Something good, huh? if you want to hone your political skills rather than your professional skills, this place has few equals.

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Post ID: @cujx+181mwjM8

The raises(3,4,5% range), coming from slashing bonus by 50% will be going to manager's favorite employees/buddies only.

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Post ID: @bkjm+181mwjM8

there will be raises(3,4,5% range). They will go to only some of the employees. I am guessing about 30%.

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Post ID: @btuv+181mwjM8

This company is great at promoting friends and family. There’s something good.

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Post ID: @bjjq+181mwjM8

After the super sh–ty move to slash bonus by 50%, best case, they will just give a portion of lost bonus back and call it a raise or a boost.

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Post ID: @banm+181mwjM8

I heard that it’s not going to be a raise but more like a performance boost increase. This company hasn’t given out raises in years and there is no reason why they would start during a pandemic.

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Post ID: @bwko+181mwjM8

Well GK promised raises by the end of the year.

I'll believe it when I see it.

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Post ID: @anhd+181mwjM8

“ K–ling the Lumada software team when Lumada was supposed to help pivot HV to high margin software”

This was the dumbest thing GK could have done. Just underscore that he’s essentially an id–t.

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Post ID: @8uzo+181mwjM8

When customers think of Cloud, they are not thinking Hitachi. There are three major Cloud players out there, AWS, Microsoft and Google. IBM lags behind but is much better positioned to compete than a lot of other companies especially Hitachi V which has been in disarray for many years. I found very few customers that will be willing to entrust their most valuable data with Hitachi V’s Cloud solution. They probably feel very uncomfortable with Hitachi V’s roadmap for the future based upon their shaky past.

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Post ID: @8bvn+181mwjM8

Champion of scoring own goals, like:

  1. Acquisition of HCC which is highly toxic to the financials of HV
  2. Splitting into DI and DS
  3. K–ling the Lumada software team when Lumada was supposed to help pivot HV to high margin software
  4. Hiring a CEO with no hardware nor software background
  5. Many more own goals to be scored in coming months, stay tuned
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Post ID: @8xza+181mwjM8

Amazing at outsourcing.

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Post ID: @7zkh+181mwjM8

They are good at making bad decisions ?? Excel at ruining themselves?

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Post ID: @7xvx+181mwjM8

They will NEVER become an analytics powerhouse. GK just laid off the analytics sales team and erased HV’s chance of becoming a software leader. They will now become a Cognizant retread with a terrible culture and low margin “global delivery” in India. Get out while you can. The ship is sinking.

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Post ID: @7qbo+181mwjM8

IBM makes $75B in revenue of which 65% is from the Cloud. They have consistently beat the estimates for the last eight quarters. HV doesn’t stand a chance with what IBM has done as far as transforming into the Cloud / IoT. HV will continue to disintegrate into ashes.

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Post ID: @7xcv+181mwjM8

Look at layoffs at IBM and by comparison Vantara will seem ok. Also they somehow got into the Gartner's leaders quadrant with Lumada. If this indeed is not a marketing achievement then the HV is doing way better than IBM. IBM Watson was a big buzz 3 years ago and now no one seems to talk about it. Its also unfair to compare IBM and Vantara though.

It was known to the management in 2017 that to pivot the company from being a VAR for Hitachi Japan to becoming a IoT and Analytics powerhouse, 70% of the staff need to be replaced. Its just taken them many years to finally do that. Along they way they made the wrong hires to replace the old employees and recently ended up firing them too.

The Japanese do not like firing employees so they must be finding it really hard to sleep these days. Please tell them though, that hiring someone else to fire people is not going to affect their Karma counter. Firing good people definitely gathers bad Karma but is an inevitable act that people in high positions must be willing to undertake.

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Post ID: @6ikd+181mwjM8

No raises in the past elven years and marginal bonuses. You get plenty of freedom especially when they lay you @ss off.

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Post ID: @6geg+181mwjM8

I worked in a lot of US Based IT companies for decades and this trend is not new. Every Q people know they can be axed in this industry. Hence the fact that right now you can replace HV with any other tech company on this website and see the same trend

What’s good about HV is that you get a lot of freedom and empowerment around driving your own shop.

What’s also good is that there are a lot of talented people you can work with.

What’s not good is that the last year’s upper management cannot decide what to do , and that is starting to hurt. A lot of that is because that HV in the core acts like a VAR from Japan.

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Post ID: @6uud+181mwjM8

Deafening......

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Post ID: @6fmg+181mwjM8

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