Yes we are changing our branding to show the alignment that already exists between HDS and our parent company Hitachi. When most people hear Hitachi, they think of HDTV’s, construction machines or consumer goods. We would like them to think about data storage when they hear or see our branding. From a practical standpoint, it reduces our marketing costs by leveraging the corporate branding.

No we do not aspire to be a large HDS monolith, or go on an acquisition binge. While Hitachi is one of the largest companies in the world, it operates as many smaller companies. As a small company we concentrate on our core competance, storage and data products and services. We draw on the R&D of Hitachi’s research labs for the base of our core compentence, and we leverage the competancies of others through collaboration to build and deliver solutions for our customers.

Mark Lewis in his recent blog posts, has been referring to Friedman’s new book, “the World is Flat”. One of the rules that Friedman gives for corporate survival in a “Flat World” is to collaborate around your core competance, rather than seeking to own or acquire. That pretty much reflects our approach.

We recognize that there are areas where we need to add headcount and new skills as the business of storage and data evolves, and we are doing so, but by and large we will stick to our business model. We would like to be a “Big Iron” while continuing to executing as a “Small Iron”

Insightful as always, thanks for checking out hds.com. Yup we’re undergoing some improvements as always. Yes, quite a few people at HDS do read rupturedmonkey as well as other blogs, forums in the industry. Your opinion of course is important to us.

Jeremiah, Community Manager, HDS

My take on this is . . . with small companies, as an individual you have nowhere to hide. If you’re not doing the job, it’s fairly evident fairly quickly. Consequently you either have to carry your load or quickly be ID’d as a slacker and let go at the first drop in profits.

In big companies (or organizations of any type – government, military, the web) it’s fairly easy to hide out (lurk) and just slip by on the minimum effort required for quite a long time. Get a large enough group of people together in a profitable-enough market niche and the pace of the entire organization slows down. Within a year or two, the most frantic of entrepreneurs can’t help but relax a bit and finally feel like they’re not being chased. Been there. Felt that.

I don’t know what the number is, but somewhere above a few hundred people, either more strict business processes have to be put into place (or someone ‘thinks’ those processes must be put into place) to . . . ensure repeatability? . . . reduce redundancy? . . . control costs? . . . motivate activity?

It sure would be interesting to discover the largest organizations in the world with the least internal processes and compare them to our ‘monoliths’. Last week I was walking in Manhattan watching the city re-supply itself for another day and thought “there is no way you could run this city via top-down management”. I wonder if any organization (besides Lincoln Electric Company) has ever made a successful try at self-organization via a free-market model? How many process controls are too many?

Years ago I read of some American company that splits off a new sub-company everytime they exceed about 250 employees. The idea is that with more people to work with than that number, any individual starts to feel like they’re out-of-the-loop (and I’d guess could start to ‘hide’ from their responsibilities). I wonder if they’re still in business.

Didn’t Hitachi post a massive loss recently?
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20061011006173&newsLang=en

Assuming this is more than just a change of branding it might be the company realigning it assets. We’ll see.