Hitachi Vantara will install in Portugal this year its Hitachi Application Reliability Center (HARC), for monitoring applications in the cloud provided to the company’s customers, the first of its kind in Europe by the Japanese multinational.
Margarida Marques, who leads Hitachi Vantara’s Portuguese operation and is the company’s VP head of continental Europe told Dinheiro Vivo that the center in Portugal will be a “proactive service that will network with HARC in the US and India for 24/7 follow-the-sun coverage”.
“In the case of European customers, it will guarantee that we have this center in Europe”, emphasizes Margarida Marques.
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HARC will be installed in Torre 1 das Amoreiras, where Hitachi Vantara has its national headquarters in Lisbon, and will require the recruitment this year of twenty professionals “trained in the most advanced practices in cloud infrastructure management”.
In addition to HARC, there is the possibility of the Japanese multinational’s Portuguese operation attracting more services to the country, in 2024. “There is a forecast for a new engineering center”, which is “still at a preliminary stage”, adds Marques.
Portugal, where Hitachi Vantara has 400 workers, is always in a good position to welcome new services from the company, according to the manager, including centers of excellence that may even arise in partnership with other companies in the Hitachi conglomerate.
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According to Marques, “in Portugal there are two absolutely strategic business areas: an engineering and design software development center; and a delivery center, which is an area for the development of services on a global level”.
“Proportionally, we serve the country little, we are fundamentally providers of services at a global level”, she underlines.
The “location of the country is absolutely strategic”, but also the quality of the talent working in the Portuguese operation, who combine technical skills and the ability to adapt to different cultures and languages. Added to this is the appetite for innovation and experimentation.
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Hitachi Vantara Portugal “is a fundamental pillar at the European level, because it stands out in the innovation and experimentation component, with a team with much more appetite and vocation to take on projects in the development phase and consolidate them”, she explains.
“We were pioneers in launching the Video Intelligence Center of Excellence, five years ago. It was launched in Portugal for the whole world and, today, it is a very independent and mature service area within the organization”, Marques told Dinheiro Vivo.
Marques says that the outlook for the 2022-2023 fiscal year (ending March 31) is “extremely positive” and for the year ahead “everything points to a growth of at least 20%, which is quite aggressive”.
