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Comment by MangoCoffee | Hacker News Reader

yup. i didn't even know Hitachi is in IT. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi)

so many Global IT houses like IBM, Avanade...etc. is IT outsource/consulting pie so large to feed all these companies?

Hitachi Data Systems has been in IT since 1989, and their history in the market goes back in to 60's or 70's. Now rebranded Hitachi Vantara, most of their revenue was competition was in the same space as EMC (now owned by Dell) for enterprise data storage. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, which you can think of like GE or something, they are in everything. The market for enterprise software and hardware is massive and often completely under the radar for an audience like HN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Data_Systems

> and often completely under the radar for an audience like HN.

what else do you think manages the massive amount of spinning rust that contains your S3 data? Usually it is storage systems like this.

Do you have some knowledge to share about s3 being built on a commercial storage platform? I was informed it was commodity and custom parts in pcs with cheap spinning rust and a lot of redundancy.

I would honestly love to read a write up from somebody closer to the source, what the hell do all these companies do?

I’ve been in tech and tech-adjacent companies for over a decade. And not once have I or anyone around me ever thought “we really need some IBM/Hitachi/Avanade products now”.

What value proposition do firms like this actually fill? I’m genuinely curious.

They’re outsourcing firms

I have worked in this space for a long time .

Most of these companies implement COTS software . So if you want to implement Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Service Now , JIRA or other such enterprise software , you will invite bids from these consulting companies for implementation, support and SLA .

The short answer is that they deliver solutions and support. What they sell, primarily, is the ability for someone at your company to call them and say "we have problem X" and they will respond "no problem, we can solve problem X for you", and they will take care of the rest. This usually costs millions of dollars.

Let's say you are a large Fortune 500 company. A bank perhaps, a large retailer or an oil company. Your net worth rivals Amazon. You do not use AWS or GCP, you host your own data centers, and you have for decades. Now let's say you need another few petabytes of storage with global replication, durability, availability, you need hardware delivered, fibre cables routed, software to tie it all together and someone to call when you run into problems or someone on your backend application team can't figure it out. Or maybe you need Oracle and SAP integrated with Active Directory for your 100,000 employees.

Well, these companies will make that happen. Or many other problems you might have, such as building custom applications, implementing tooling, designing systems, whatever. It's kind of like asking "who employs all these personal chefs?! I've been eating for years and I've never needed a personal chef. I just go to the store, buy some groceries, and make food from the recipes I find online!" The thing is that some people just don't want to deal with all that, and they have enough money to make it someone else's problem who has done it before.

I spent five years in this space (in a small consultancy that was acquired by GlobalLogic last year). I think this is how one of our salespeople might describe the process.

The reality tends to be somewhat messier. I especially disagree with the "personal chef" analogy. A personal chef is an expensive, dedicated, long-term employee - much closer to a full time SWE than to a consultancy. It's more like hiring a catering company for a wedding.

You're right, that would have been better. I certainly didn't mean to imply this process always goes smoothly, or that the quality of the work they provide is without question.

When I started down the Fortune 500 consultancy path, the quality (or lack thereof) used to bother me a lot, then I realised that most customers don't really care, what they want is something that makes their core business run, doesn't matter how.

As long as their core business and KPIs remain untouched, and no scalations take place, everything is fine.

Tech or tech-adjacent firms tend to be defined that way, at least in part, because they do the things these major software consultancies and outsourcing firms do on their own.

If you're not a tech or tech-adjacent firm, and have a nontrivial technology need, you're likely to pick up the phone and call someone who specializes in delivering those solutions.

Think of it like the difference between Instacart having their own software teams and infrastructure to manage shoppers and orders, vs the national grocery chain Instacart operates within calling IBM for an integrated inventory management and point-of-sale system.

There are debates to be had about whether this approach yields good results over the long term (specifically for the inventory management example, you could point to Amazon and to a lesser extent Walmart having such success in part because of their internal software efforts). But if you aren't prepared to reinvent your grocery stores as a friendly frontend for your logistics technology, plenty of firms have solutions to sell you.

Some nice responses to this, but I'd be interested in hearing about the trade off between a big company spinning its own IT department vs hiring an IBM et al.

Attached to articles about ERP and government contracts failing and going over budget I often see comments like, this isn't rocket science I could code something for them. Obviously not the right fit for everybody, but is it right for some?

Large companies often have business people that drive tech initiatives. Once they come into a position where they need to propose goals, they will either need to lean on existing technical leaders in the org or reach out to firms that can technically scope their aspirations. Sometimes they might have just one year to prove their direction, so they aren’t going to wait around to develop in-house or hire for months and months trying to find a culture fit. They are going to staff in a hurry and get rolling yesterday.

Stay close to agencies that have leads at organizations like this because that’s a great way to get hired at a place you’d never expect to be working for (some random Fortune 500 company), and these hiring sprees don’t show up on LinkedIn or job boards. They go straight to the consultancies or agencies (you know, those pesky recruiters you never cared for).

> is IT outsource/consulting pie so large to feed all these companies?

Oh darn well it is (I worked at one of those consulting companies long time ago). Many people don't realize how much of the software is written by those companies. I personally worked onsite and offsite for two FAANG companies, one health insurance, and one telecom company. I myself was amazed how often projects were pretty critical to their operations, while I was technically not their employee. In case of FAANG companies we signed a paper agreeing we will not publicly say we did anything for them.

I know friends who work the same way for major US banks, credit agencies, energy and retail companies. I have hard time imagining a big company that doesn't buy IT outsourcing (probably government agencies, like military, space, but I'm not sure about their suppliers).

It definitly is, because most companies core product isn't shipping software.

Software is a cost center on their production line that they gladly outsource.

E.g. a company selling water bottles doesn't care how their inventory system looks like, as long as it doesn't affect how many of them get shipped.

Hitachi Solutions is a big player for public IT works in Japan, as well as NTT, NEC, Fujitsu, and IBM

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