Japan – Hitachi: Established the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) to Globally Lead the Strategic Utilization of OSS

Hitachi, Ltd. (“Hitachi”) has established the Open Source Program Office (Hitachi OSPO) to globally lead the strategic utilization of OSS in the Hitachi Group, leveraging its extensive experience in applying OSS to social infrastructure, and its technical capabilities and knowledge that have led the community. Hitachi OSPO will survey advanced OSS, plan utilization strategies, manage compliance with OSS licenses and other regulations, train advanced engineers, and promote the OSS propagation. Hitachi OSPO will start with a team of 60 people and aim to expand to a scale of 100 people including global members. Through these activities, we will solve social issues through open innovation with stakeholders in companies and government agencies, and contribute to the acceleration of DX for customers in a wide range of fields.

Yuichi Nakamura, Hitachi Chief OSS Strategist, has been appointed as Head of Hitachi OSPO (Head of OSPO). Nakamura said, “As an OSS contributor for more than 20 years and currently a board member and evangelist for The Linux Foundation (LF), I have been pursuing initiatives to balance and align OSS community activities with business applications. Leveraging my past experiences, Hitachi OSPO will promote a culture of collaboration in OSS within the Hitachi Group, lead the OSS community contribution as One Hitachi, and foster globally top-class engineers. We will also work with LF to continuously share Hitachi OSPO’s expertise across multiple communities and contribute to the realization of a society that grows sustainably with OSS. “

Shigetoshi Sameshima, CTO of Digital Systems & Services Division in Hitachi said, “Since our foundation, Hitachi has embraced the corporate philosophy of contributing to society through superior technology. We have been engaging in collaborative creation with a wide range of stakeholders to address various social challenges and implementing its value in society. In OSS, we are also promoting open innovation leveraging Hitachi R&D Initiative “Kyōsō-no-Mori” to contribute to community development, as well as implementing OSS in social infrastructures such as finance, public services, and transportation. We hope that Hitachi OSPO, which consolidates the knowledge from these activities, will contribute to the development of a sustainable society by further deepening co-creation with global stakeholders to swiftly resolve increasingly complex social issues in the future.”

Hitachi major OSS activities

As a sponsor of LF since its establishment in 2000, Hitachi has worked on improving the reliability of the Linux kernel and developing Keycloak financial security functions in compliance with European and South American standards, and has contributed to the spread and expansion of OSS through community activities in Japan. Most recently, we have been playing a central role in revitalizing community activities in Japan, including the establishment of Cloud Native Community Japan*1, the Japan Chapter of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). In recognition of these longstanding activities, Hitachi employees are actively involved in roles such as LF Japan evangelists*2, CNCF ambassadors, and maintainers*3*4 of projects like Keycloak and Hyperledger Fabric in the global community. Furthermore, as the Hitachi Group, we jointly exhibit solutions utilizing CNCF project OSS at CNCF global events, and continue to engage in global propagation activities.

Recently, OSS has been expanding its use in a wide range of fields, such as cloud-native technologies and device control, and it has become important to establish rules and processes for the appropriate use of OSS, as well as the framework for proper operation. In addition, the OSS community has become a place for open innovation, where engineers from around the world actively discuss and develop new functions and common standards in collaboration with various stakeholders. Against this background, global corporations and government agencies are increasingly establishing OSPOs as specialized organizations to systematically support the activities of their employees who utilize OSS and contribute to the OSS community.

Commenting on the launch of Hitachi OSPO, Jim Zemlin, The Linux Foundation Executive Director said, “Setting up an OSPO has been a global trend and an integral function within large enterprises to manage their open source efforts efficiently. We are very happy to see that Hitachi stepped forward to invest in open source in a strategic manner with OSPO. We also happy to see their willingness to share the best practice with other industry peers. The Linux Foundation will support their endeavor as much as we can.”

Speech on Hitachi OSPO at The Linux Foundation Member Summit

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