Core Values that Aren't Just Wall Art: Rediscovering Hitachi-Vantara Through WWT's Associate Academy

The things I remember being most important in life as an 8-year-old mostly revolved around playing and watching sports, and spending time playing video games with my parents and two younger sisters. At the center of it all was a Hitachi projection TV. 

It seems hilarious now, but the 60" rear-projection screen in our childhood living room felt like I was stepping into the future every time we grabbed a controller or the remote and plopped down on the couch.

Hitachi was founded on the values of Harmony, Sincerity, and a Pioneering Spirit. While likely not in those words specifically, they were communicated to younger me continuously, each time I sat down with my dad to watch basketball, or with my sisters to play Fuzion Frenzy. Their sessions with us as the Partner of the Month in WWT's Associate Academy partner enablement series felt cut from the same cloth, and it was immediately obvious that those founding principles still permeate everything they're currently doing in the IT space today.

A Strategic Partnership Designed to Last

WWT's Associate Academy hosts a monthly Partner of the Month speaker series designed to introduce us to valued partners, participate in engaging enablement sessions to learn more about their services and solutions and (perhaps most importantly) to build relationships. 

Over the last month, Hitachi Vantara hosted four sessions covering everything: from Storage, to Cybersecurity, their Center of Excellence and everything in between. We had the privilege of working with two team members throughout these sessions, Brittany Hofer (Pre-Sales Solution Consultant) and David Schenberg (National Partner Manager). Their industry knowledge, unique insights, and high-quality character shone through each interactive presentation and discussion. 

In every session, we were introduced to a new facet of Hitachi-Vantara. Enterprise-grade storage with a unique blend of simplicity, agility, and customization paired with industry-unmatched guarantees to ensure you're in the right solution for both your present and your future. 

Their storage platform story aligns closely with the values HV established at its founding, pairing a pioneering spirit and a desire to innovate in its industry with the harmony and sincerity to do so with integrity, ensuring a smooth, high-quality experience for its end-users. 

There are a few features and wisdoms that have resonated with me throughout the month of getting to know Hitachi-Vantara, including the VSP 360 platform, their unrivaled data guarantees, and the importance of understanding your customer and what's driving their goals before racing to the finish line together. 

Visibility. No Blind Spots

Having previously worked in the IT Storage space, I've heard the Hitachi storage story before. I specifically remember working with a customer who told me that while his counterparts on their Asia-Pacific (APAC) teams loved the Hitachi storage arrays and overall platform, it felt too difficult and robust for his NA IT team to undertake a hardware pivot with such a complex management system with a steep learning curve.

It turns out my client wasn't the only user feeling this way, and the next generation of Hitachi Vantara was purpose-built to address concerns like this. 

Hitachi Vantara's Virtual Storage Platform 360 gives you a holistic view of your entire data footprint, no matter the storage type or location. It was designed to address data sprawl and the inefficiencies of managing diverse workloads and platforms, removing complexity from the storage environment and freeing users to run other initiatives rather than just surviving the day-to-day and fighting to manage their current ecosystem.

A specific way the platform achieves this, addressing my client's fear of migration, is with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Integration.  This allows teams to streamline their IT integrations with direct API access to VSP One system management functions and enables container orchestration for fast application workload provisioning at scale. 

Words are the easy part

Backing up what you say with action is an important part of both Hitachi-Vantara and WWT's corporate cultures, with their founding principles of harmony and sincerity akin to our core values of trust and honesty. While most companies, and most people, to be frank, go above and beyond with what they claim they can deliver, Hitachi takes it a step further by guaranteeing the quality of the solution you are going to receive with your technological investment. You can read more about all their Customer Guarantees on their website, but I want to highlight the one that not only resonated with me the most but would also be immediately applicable and invaluable in future customer conversations. 

My personal favorite of these guarantees is their Cyber Resilience guarantee. They partnered with Index Engines to enable their customers to achieve predictable, continuous operations with clean data recovery in seconds after a cyberattack. The platform allows users to have peace of mind by detecting malware and bad actors in the environment and automatically identifying the last clean snapshot. As Brittany Hofer said in one of our sessions together,

When things go wrong, having the peace of mind that your environment is protected and recoverable immediately after it happens is an enormous weight off any IT team's shoulders, allowing them to continue creating and innovating, rather than struggling to put out fires and keep the lights on day-to-day. This guarantee is backed by a promise: 40 hours of incident response services if your clean data is unrecoverable. Another example of their dedication to meaning what they say and delivering positive outcomes early and often for their customers. 

Today's Lessons, Tomorrow's Musings

A full month of interactive sessions behind us, what has stuck with me? After updating my warm childhood memories of Hitachi Vantara to include their current innovative storage platform, I think what will stick with me most after this month of sessions is the quality of the people on the other side of the phone (conference call in this case) and their attention to detail in knowing their customers.

 At their core, both Hitachi Vantara and WWT prioritize building genuine relationships and advocating for the person on the other side of the screen. By starting with the customer—seeking to understand their goals and challenges rather than leading with a predetermined solution—we're able to identify the right approach. One that addresses the root of the problem, delivers lasting value, and creates positive outcomes today, while establishing a trusted partnership you can rely on when future challenges arise.

It was extremely refreshing to hear both David and Brittany speak to the importance of understanding the problems IT teams face on a day-to-day basis and the people behind them. In our final call together, David imparted us with a small nugget of wisdom that has bounced around the inside walls of my brain since the moment it left his mouth.  

A partnership here has been architected with a focus on people, character, and relationships -- something that feels extremely rare in the modern world. I hope you feel as inspired hearing about our sessions as I have felt participating in them throughout the month, and I greatly look forward to the next opportunity to dive in with Hitachi Vantara. 

If you'd like to explore our partnership more, you can visit the WWT Hitachi Vantara partner page.

About the Author

Howdy! My name is Cooper. I joined WWT in February 2026 as an Associate Client Manager. I am based in Seattle, WA, but grew up as a Midwest kid in Topeka, KS. 

Professionally, my time as an Enterprise Account Manager at Dell EMC and Smartsheet sparked a passion for technology and for leveraging it to create unique solutions for the customers and companies I work with. 

Academically, I hold a bachelor's degree from Kansas State University, dual-majoring in Marketing and Professional Strategic Selling, with a minor in Spanish, and an emphasis and certificate in Data Analytics. My goal at WWT is to intertwine creativity with intentionality and to deliver unique insights and meaningful solutions to my clients and coworkers early and often.

Outside of work, you can find me playing rec basketball, singing in my local community choir, attending sporting events and finding live music every chance I get. I love any excuse to try a new restaurant, listening to an album front-to-back, and treasure time with my family and my friends.