Less than 48 hours after Atos SE inked a $3.4 billion deal to acquire Syntel Inc., the information technology services market is seeing some more consolidation.

Hitachi Ltd. today announced plans to buy Rean Cloud LLC, a systems integrator that specializes in public cloud projects. The deal is being carried out by Hitachi’s Vantara division, which emerged from the merger of the company’s data storage, analytics and “internet of things” groups last year.

Rean, in turn, launched in 2013 and already boasts a long list of completed projects under its belt. The Herndon, Virginia-based firm has landed deals with more than a dozen major organizations including the American Heart Association and Decathlon SA, the world’s largest sporting goods retailer.

Rean also got involved in some controversy along the way. Earlier this year, the Pentagon awarded the company a nearly $1 billion contract to migrate its legacy applications to the cloud, but then scrapped the deal following industry outcry. Oracle Corp. and others argued that giving the deal to Rean, which is a Premier Consulting Partner of Amazon Web Services Inc., showed favoritism to AWS. The firm is a Microsoft Corp. partner as well.

In today’s acquisition announcement, Hitachi indicated that it sees the company’s cloud partnerships as an asset. Another factor that the company no doubt took into account is the large variety of fields in which Rean operates. Its competencies include developing software solutions for analytics and Internet of Things use cases, two of Vantara’s biggest focus areas.

Hitachi plans to draw on Rean’s expertise to establish a bigger presence in the cloud market.

“Hitachi Vantara already offers trusted and reliable private cloud solutions for customers who want pay-as-you-go experiences without having to move their data off premises,” said Bobby Soni, Vantara’s head of solutions and services. “With REAN Cloud, we will be able to extend our unified cloud offerings to public and hybrid clouds, and we will enable customers to accelerate their digital transformations by deploying analytics-centric solutions to drive business outcomes.”

Vantara Chief Executive Brian Householder offered a more detailed view of the group’s strategy on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE studio last year. Like Soni, he emphasized Vantara’s focus on analytics, saying “we still provide the infrastructure for companies, but it’s much more around how does that infrastructure help you drive the right kind of data strategy for your organization.” Here’s the full interview:

Image: SiliconANLE