Hitachi Consulting was an international management and technology consulting firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Established in November 2000 as a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, the firm aimed to deliver comprehensive business and IT strategies to Global 2000 companies across various industries.
Brief History and Growth of Hitachi Consulting (Pre-2019)
Hitachi Consulting was established in November 2000 as the global consulting arm of Hitachi, Ltd., via the acquisition of Grant Thornton’s Chicago-based IT and strategy consulting practice. Initially branded as “Experio Solutions,” it adopted the Hitachi Consulting name in 2003 after licensing the Hitachi brand. From the outset, Hitachi Consulting focused on management and technology consulting, aiming to leverage Hitachi’s broader technology heritage. Early growth was fueled by a series of acquisitions in the 2000s. Notably, the firm absorbed 23 partners and 370 consultants from Arthur Andersen Business Consulting in 2002 (after Andersen’s dissolution). It also acquired WaveBend Solutions (2001), Tactica Technology (2001), Dove Consulting (2005), Navigator Systems (2006), Impact Plus in the UK (2007), Iteration2 (2007), and JMN Associates (2008) – building out capabilities in enterprise systems, CRM, and industry-specific consulting.
By the 2010s, Hitachi Consulting continued expanding globally and into new service domains. It acquired Sierra Atlantic (2011) to strengthen offshore IT services and Celerant Consulting (an operations and strategy consultancy) in late 2012, integrating those into its offerings. In 2014, it purchased IMGroup, a UK-based business intelligence consultancy, and Stone Apple Solutions (with 1,500 staff across Southeast Asia) to boost its presence in Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and beyond. By the late 2010s, Hitachi Consulting had transformed into a mid-sized global player focusing on both business consulting and digital technology solutions. It served as a bridge between Hitachi’s rich operational technology (OT) background and emerging information technology (IT) consulting opportunities. Primary service areas included IT strategy, enterprise application implementation (e.g. SAP, Oracle), business process improvement, analytics and data management, and – increasingly – digital transformation and IoT advisory services to support Hitachi’s “Social Innovation” initiatives.
Consulting Services, Industries, and Notable Projects
Before integration into Hitachi Vantara, Hitachi Consulting offered a broad range of management consulting and IT consulting services to enterprise clients. Its consultants worked on digital transformation strategies, data analytics, cloud migration, enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations, supply chain optimization, and customer relationship management. The firm prided itself on being “consulting-led” and outcomes-focused, often bundling strategy, technology, and implementation. It served 20+ industries, with particular strength in manufacturing, energy & utilities, transportation, financial services, healthcare, and the public sector. Backed by Hitachi’s engineering heritage, Hitachi Consulting also developed niche expertise in operational technology and IoT – positioning itself as an early mover in areas like smart city planning and industrial IoT solutions.
Notable projects spanned the globe. For example, Hitachi Consulting was selected to design the smart city services for One Bangkok, Thailand’s largest private sector property development. One Bangkok is a cutting-edge mixed-use “smart” district; Hitachi Consulting’s team was responsible for the high-level design of the smart city platform and sensor grid that integrate everything from energy and water management to security and traffic control. Sensors and analytics embedded throughout the development allow real-time adjustments to optimize operations, and Hitachi Consulting’s IoT-driven design became the “beating heart” of this future-forward urban project. Another flagship engagement was with Wolseley UK (Ferguson), a major plumbing and heating products distributor. Wolseley hired Hitachi Consulting to transform its supply chain operations by implementing Oracle Cloud SaaS/PaaS solutions for forecasting, inventory and distribution management. The project, begun in 2017, provided Wolseley with a single, cloud-based view of stock and centralized planning – reducing the need for buffer inventory at each location and improving agility in meeting customer demand. These examples illustrate Hitachi Consulting’s role in both innovative digital initiatives (smart cities) and core enterprise modernization projects (cloud-based ERP and supply chain). The firm’s client base reportedly included about 25% of Global 100 companies, demonstrating its reach among large enterprises.
Revenue, Workforce, and Global Presence (Pre-Merger)
By the late 2010s, Hitachi Consulting had grown into a substantial global consultancy (albeit smaller than the Big Four and top-tier IT services firms). The most recent available statistics before the 2019 merger show that Hitachi Consulting employed roughly 5,000 to 6,500 professionals worldwide. (The firm’s workforce was often cited as “over 5,000” in 2019, up from about 6,500 in 2015, reflecting some streamlining and integration of acquisitions.) These consultants and technologists were distributed across dozens of offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. As of the mid-2010s, Hitachi Consulting had operations in at least 21 countries, including the United States, Japan, China, India, Brazil, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Spain, Portugal, and Vietnam. This global footprint allowed it to serve multinational clients with local teams and to tap talent in key markets (including sizeable delivery centers in India and Vietnam, bolstered by the Stone Apple acquisition).
In terms of financials, Hitachi Consulting was a multi-hundred-million to low-billion dollar business for Hitachi. While exact revenue figures were not publicly broken out, industry estimates placed Hitachi Consulting’s annual revenues in the $1–2 billion range by the late 2010s. (One third-party analysis estimated ~$1.7 billion in annual revenue with around 5,500 employees, implying a healthy revenue per consultant of ~$300K.) This scale made Hitachi Consulting a mid-sized consulting firm – significantly smaller than giants like Accenture, but comparable to the consulting divisions of other global IT players. Notably, in Hitachi Ltd.’s context, the consulting arm was a relatively small piece of an ~$85 billion conglomerate. However, it was strategically important as the tip-of-the-spear for Hitachi’s “Social Innovation Business,” bringing digital solutions to market. The firm’s integration of management consulting with deep technical expertise allowed Hitachi Consulting to punch above its weight in delivering complex projects, and gave Hitachi a higher-margin services component to complement its products.
Integration into Hitachi Vantara in 2019: Rationale and Impact
In September 2019, Hitachi, Ltd. announced that Hitachi Consulting would be integrated with Hitachi Vantara, effective January 2020. Hitachi Vantara is Hitachi’s data services and infrastructure subsidiary that had been formed in 2017 by merging Hitachi Data Systems, Pentaho, and Hitachi Insight Group. The strategic rationale for this merger was to create a more unified digital solutions company that could provide end-to-end services – from data infrastructure and software to consulting and digital delivery. Hitachi’s leadership saw growing market demand for integrated digital transformation offerings, and combining the consulting arm’s advisory capabilities with Vantara’s technology and product portfolio was intended to “accelerate global expansion of Hitachi’s Social Innovation Business and digital growth.” In particular, Hitachi aimed to strengthen its Lumada business (Lumada is Hitachi’s IoT and data platform) by aligning consulting, analytics, and technology delivery under one roof.
From an organizational perspective, the move retired the Hitachi Consulting brand after nearly two decades. The consulting unit and its employees were rolled into Hitachi Vantara’s operations, creating a combined entity of roughly 12,000 employees (7,000 from Vantara’s existing workforce plus 5,000 from Consulting). This effectively made Hitachi Vantara not just a data infrastructure provider but also a full-scale digital consultancy, which Hitachi described as a “digital infrastructure and solutions powerhouse.” The integration was accompanied by leadership changes: Toshiaki Tokunaga, who was Chairman of Hitachi Global Digital Holdings (overseeing both Vantara and Consulting), was appointed CEO and Chairman of Hitachi Vantara to lead the combined organization. Hitachi Consulting’s CEO, Hicham Abdessamad, and Hitachi Vantara’s CEO, Brian Householder, both stayed on in executive roles to support the merged business.
Strategically, the impact on services was to more tightly bind consulting expertise with Hitachi’s technology offerings. Hitachi Consulting’s teams became the consulting and professional services division within Hitachi Vantara, working alongside the product engineering teams. This allowed Hitachi Vantara to offer clients a one-stop solution: for example, pitching a data analytics or IoT solution that includes the storage infrastructure, the Lumada software platform, and consulting services for design and implementation. “This integration uniquely positions us to accelerate time to value for our customers and provide digital solutions at scale,” said Abdessamad at the time. In essence, consulting became a front-end to drive more Hitachi technology adoption, and conversely Hitachi’s tech portfolio gave the consultants a differentiated toolkit. The combined group focused on delivering outcome-based digital transformation – helping customers leverage data (from the data center to the cloud to the edge) and Hitachi’s OT/IT expertise to achieve business results. The integration was also part of Hitachi, Ltd.’s 2021 Mid-term Plan to grow digital revenues and “expand its global delivery and co-creation capabilities” by breaking down silos between its business units.
Within the broader Hitachi ecosystem today, the former Hitachi Consulting functions as an integral component of Hitachi Vantara’s solutions business, closely aligned with Hitachi’s industry-focused groups. Hitachi, Ltd. has organized its global operations into sectors (such as IT, Energy, Industry, Mobility, Smart Life), and the digital consulting and solutions capabilities of Hitachi Vantara support all these sectors as part of Hitachi’s Social Innovation strategy. In practical terms, Hitachi Vantara (with its consulting arm) is the vehicle through which Hitachi delivers cross-industry digital offerings – from smart energy grid analytics to predictive maintenance for industrial equipment – often under the Lumada brand. The consulting expertise helps tailor these solutions to each client’s business. Notably, Hitachi has continued to invest in this area even after the 2019 integration; in 2021 Hitachi acquired GlobalLogic, a 20,000-employee product engineering and digital design firm, to further bolster its digital consulting and software development capabilities. The synergy of Hitachi Vantara’s consulting heritage and GlobalLogic’s digital engineering is now driving Hitachi’s ability to “co-create” with clients in designing and building new digital products and services. In summary, the consulting function that originated in Hitachi Consulting is now a core part of Hitachi Vantara’s value proposition and plays a key role in Hitachi’s end-to-end solutions across its industrial and IT businesses.
Market Position and Competitors in Consulting & Digital Transformation
As an integrated part of Hitachi Vantara, the consulting division faces competition from both traditional IT consulting firms and the digital services arms of industrial peers. In the IT consulting and digital transformation arena, Hitachi Vantara’s consulting group goes up against giants like Accenture, IBM Global Services, Deloitte, and Capgemini, which offer broad consulting combined with technology integration. These competitors dwarf Hitachi in size – for instance, Accenture employs over 500,000 people – but Hitachi’s strategy has been to differentiate through its unique blend of IT and OT expertise. Few consultancies can claim over a century of operational technology experience; Hitachi leverages this heritage (in fields like manufacturing, railways, energy systems) to offer more engineering-driven digital solutions. This positions Hitachi Vantara’s consultants particularly well in projects involving IoT, industrial automation, and “smart” infrastructure, where they compete with firms like Siemens (through Siemens Advanta) or General Electric (through GE Digital) in addition to the mainstream IT consultancies.
Hitachi’s approach to integrating consulting into its core business is part of a broader trend in the industry. In fact, the move mirrored what some competitors have done: for example, Capgemini in 2018 folded its consulting arm (Capgemini Consulting) into a new integrated digital unit (Capgemini Invent). This reflects a market demand for end-to-end digital partners rather than siloed advisory services. Hitachi’s integration was noted as similar in spirit – creating a one-stop-shop for digital transformation. On the other hand, some competitors have taken the opposite approach by maintaining distinct consulting brands or practices. Firms like Atos, CGI, and Cognizant have continued to invest in their consulting brands as separate expert advisory units, to ensure they are seen as independent advisors. Hitachi has clearly chosen the integrated path, fully merging its consulting into Hitachi Vantara.
In terms of capabilities, Hitachi Vantara’s consulting division today competes in several niches: data analytics consulting (competing with IBM, Accenture, etc., as well as specialist firms), cloud and infrastructure consulting (competing with IT service providers like TCS, Infosys, Wipro who also do cloud transformations), and product engineering services (now augmented by GlobalLogic, putting Hitachi against companies like EPAM, Infosys Engineering, or Capgemini Engineering in software product development). While smaller than the top-tier consultancies, Hitachi’s consulting arm often competes by emphasizing its “digital innovation” credentials – combining strategic advisory with deep technical implementation skills and industry domain knowledge. The consulting unit was frequently positioned alongside big consulting firms in industry rankings and had a competitive edge in projects requiring heavy technology infrastructure knowledge. For instance, in Oracle and SAP cloud implementation services, Hitachi Consulting (now part of Vantara) has been seen as a capable rival to the likes of Accenture or Deloitte, with Gartner peer reviews rating Hitachi Vantara similarly in certain cloud service categories. Moreover, the “double bottom line” ethos Hitachi Vantara promotes – focusing on business and societal outcomes – resonates in socially oriented digital projects and can set it apart from pure-play consultancies.
Overall, Hitachi Vantara’s consulting division occupies a unique market position: it’s not as large as the leading IT consultancies, but it is backed by a global industrial tech powerhouse. This allows it to pitch an integrated solution (from devices to data to insights) that few others can match. The competitive landscape remains intense, especially in the booming digital transformation market, but Hitachi’s continued investment (such as the GlobalLogic acquisition) suggests it is committed to staying relevant and expanding its footprint among top-tier digital solution providers.
Post-Integration Leadership and Strategic Changes
The integration into Hitachi Vantara brought several leadership and operational changes for the consulting business. As mentioned, Hitachi veteran Toshiaki Tokunaga led the merged Hitachi Vantara + Consulting unit initially, with a mandate to unify the teams and drive the next phase of growth. By mid-2020, Hitachi appointed Gajen Kandiah (a former Cognizant executive) as the new CEO of Hitachi Vantara, succeeding Tokunaga in the chief executive role. Kandiah’s arrival – effective July 2020 – was a significant leadership change, signaling Hitachi’s intent to “rapidly scale digital businesses”, as Kandiah had a track record of growing Cognizant’s digital services into multibillion-dollar operations. Tokunaga transitioned to a Chairman role after Kandiah took over, ensuring continuity. Around the same time, the previous heads of Hitachi Consulting (Hicham Abdessamad) and Hitachi Vantara (Brian Householder) eventually moved on from day-to-day operations; Hitachi created a new unified leadership team blending talent from both legacy organizations and new hires. This leadership refresh was aimed at accelerating the integration benefits and pivoting the organization towards a “digital-first” services strategy.
Operationally, the merger meant that what used to be Hitachi Consulting no longer operated as a separate subsidiary. Its consulting practices were reorganized under Hitachi Vantara’s services and solutions lines. In early 2020, Hitachi Vantara announced a new organizational structure that integrated consulting delivery with product delivery. The company also aligned its go-to-market teams by industry, meaning former consulting specialists and product specialists now work together in vertical-focused units (e.g. Energy, Manufacturing, Financial Services). This has helped break down silos – a key goal mentioned in the integration plan to “unlock synergies between Hitachi Vantara and Hitachi’s vertical business units.” Importantly, the Hitachi Consulting culture and brand were sunset: from January 2020, employees switched to Hitachi Vantara business cards and branding, and the “Hitachi Consulting” name was officially retired. This unified identity has likely streamlined marketing and delivery, although it required harmonizing different corporate cultures (Hitachi Consulting had a more advisory culture, whereas Hitachi Vantara had a product-oriented culture).
Strategically, post-integration, Hitachi Vantara’s consulting (together with its broader portfolio) has increasingly focused on solutions around data, cloud, and industrial digitalization. The company launched new solution offerings that bundle consulting with technology. For instance, Hitachi Vantara (with its consulting team) has been actively promoting “X as a Service” solutions, co-creation labs, and accelerators for digital transformation, reflecting a shift to more outcome-based engagements. Another major strategic development was the above-mentioned GlobalLogic acquisition in 2021. Rather than keep GlobalLogic separate, Hitachi has emphasized collaboration between GlobalLogic and Hitachi Vantara’s consulting units – for example, using GlobalLogic’s design and software engineering prowess together with Hitachi Vantara’s domain consultants to deliver comprehensive digital products. This is part of Hitachi’s strengthened Digital Services ecosystem, which now spans Hitachi Vantara (infrastructure, analytics, consulting) and GlobalLogic (product engineering), under the umbrella of Hitachi’s Social Innovation Business.
Sources
The information above is compiled from recent analyses and credible reports, including the firm’s own publications and reporting by reputable outlets.
