Case Study: Hitachi cuts development environment setup from days to minutes with Microsoft Azure (Red Hat OpenShift)

Hitachi speeds dev environment setup from days to minutes by using Red Hat OpenShift on Azure

Hitachi Application Services—maker of the JavaEE-based Hitachi Application Framework used by more than 10,000 developers—needed to speed delivery and reduce variability in large, mission‑critical application projects for finance, transportation and public-sector customers. As software requirements grew more complex and customers demanded faster innovation, Hitachi faced long, manual test‑environment setups (three to four days), uneven code quality tied to individual skills, and hesitancy about public‑cloud adoption.

To address this, Hitachi containerized its framework on Red Hat OpenShift and runs it on Microsoft Azure (RHEL on Azure VMs, Azure Storage and Virtual Network). The combination automates and standardizes environment provisioning—cutting setup from days to about 20 minutes (and container additions to seconds)—improves portability and team flexibility, reduces reliance on “gurus,” lowers customers’ cloud adoption barriers, and enables new cloud‑based service and API offerings.

Hitachi

Yuji Hirose

Head of Service Provisioning Department, Service Solution Operation