A little over a year after announcing plans to harness the vast amounts of data coming off the connected universe, Hitachi Ltd. is delivering on the promise with the launch of a homegrown analytics platform called Lumada. The move adds its name to the long list of global industrial giants that hope to become more competitive by helping customers extract useful information from their equipment.

The arms race was started in 2014 when General Electric Co. introduced Predix, a cloud-based environment with native tools for processing sensory transmissions and other machine-generated data. Organizations can utilize the functionality to develop custom services tailored for their specific use cases, whether it’s analyzing maintenance logs from jet engines or assessing the profitability of a mining site. Lumada is also designed to power customer applications, but differs greatly from GE’s system under the hood.

Whereas the conglomerate built Predix using technology from the recently-funded Pivotal Software Inc., the foundation of Hitachi’s platform is the business intelligence service it gained through the acquisition of Pentaho Inc. last year. The software is used by more than 1,600 organizations around the world, an install base that is being touted as an indicator of Lumada’s trustworthiness. The marketing effort is led by a newly formed division within the Japanese giant that was established with the specific goal of monetizing the connected universe.

The Hitachi Insight Group is made up of over 16,000 employees who have been handpicked from the industrial giant’s data center, professional services and analytics businesses. They will work under the leadership of Keiji Kojima, a 34-year company veteran with a PhD in computer science who also serves as its chief technology office. The amount of manpower that has been allocated  to the effort shows just how big of a priority machine-generated data is becoming for the outfit and heavy industry in general.

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