Hitachi’s local shake-up

The role was created specifically for Elisha as part of Hitachi's renewed focus on local markets. His responsibilities will include defining the technical direction of the vendor and aligning the company’s storage technologies and services to meet customer business requirements.

“Hitachi identified a niche market and I was the person for that market,” said Elisha. “I will be taking care of the Australia and New Zealand markets and understanding and communicating the needs of customers back to corporate.”

According to Elisha, the offering of storage compatibility and interoperability support for IBM mainframes illustrates Hitachi’s continued investment in open systems and mainframe environments.

“Many businesses still have mainframes that form their infrastructure,” he said. “Mainframe is certainly not dead and we’re here to help businesses take advantage of technologies such as virtualisation.”

Hitachi will certify Enterprise System Connection, Fiber Connection and Fibre Channel Protocol connectivity for the new zSeries servers. Hitachi will also continue to support z/OS®, z/VSE and z/VM operating systems.

Elisha commented that his first priority in the new role is to work with channel partners to identify the concerns of businesses in A/NZ.

“My priority is to listen and undertand the challenges facing businesses and translate them into business solutions,” he said. “Companies need help identifying what they need, because often they can feel the pain of the problem but be unsure of how to fix it.”

Elisha will remain based in Melbourne and will report directly to managing director, Mark Kay.