HDS, Hitachi Data Systems has forever been the industry's poster child of the consummate Japanese technology company – brilliant engineering, unquestionable quality, and a complete void of the creativity that has been a Hallmark of the west.  It seems that is changing.

HDS is a wholly owned subsidiary of the absurdly large Hitachi, Ltd., a roughly $130B global player in everything from power generation systems to super-trains to micro-electronic components. 

HDS itself is a profitable, double digit growth entity that sells billions of dollars of high-end storage systems every year – despite being about as exciting as 3 day Cricket match which ends in a draw, nil-nil.

Dave Roberson was the American senior executive at HDS for what seems like decades.  A few years ago, he decided to move from the decidedly stable Japanese culture and inject himself into HP – a decidedly different kind of place.  Enter Jack Domme.

Jack, a curly haired blonde that looks about as non-Japanese as is imaginable, has quietly been shifting the HDS culture to become more global from an operating perspective.  He figured out that having superior engineering and quality competency combined with more of the creative western thinking in terms of marketing, go to market strategies, and just plain out-of-the-box thinking would be a good combination.  It seems his bet has just paid off.

After years as COO, Jack was just announced as CEO of HDS, and I think he is the first gaijin to hold the job.  Nicely done.  Jack has added some serious talent around him over the last few years, including Brian Householder – a super smart, super nice, absurdly tall marketing mucky muck and most recently, EJ Schmidt, a former EMC marketing dude along with Asim Zaheer, a long time industry marketing guy with lots of scrappy start-up experience (and also unreasonably tall).

I can almost guarantee you that the boring HDS of old ain't gonna be as boring moving forward, and for that I am happy.  It's hard enough to try to make this industry interesting every day, let alone when a company like HDS used to show up with it's new product – all about how easy it is to use – with a presentation that is 198 slides long. So I'm not sure we'll be seeing any explosives, but I suspect they will be cooking up something that merits our attention. 

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