Hitachi Vantara refreshes Australia partner incentive plan

Hitachi Vantara has expanded its Australian channel programme with a refreshed FY26 Run To Win incentive scheme and a six-city partner engagement series attended by 70 participants.

The series ran in Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Perth. Partners and Hitachi Vantara teams took part in Cook. Connect. Collaborate sessions led by professional chefs. The events introduced the updated incentive structure and explored whether Australian organisations are ready, from a data and infrastructure perspective, for AI.

Under the revised Run To Win programme, partners are rewarded through two streams: growing sales within existing customers through upsell, cross-sell and upgrade activity, and securing net-new customer logos. The second category carries a higher reward.

The programme also expands eligible Virtual Storage Platform One midrange business to include add-on systems and gives greater weighting to partner-sourced opportunities.

Eligibility extends to Hitachi Vantara Elite, Member and Premier partners in Australia, with Lynx Technologies administering the programme locally.

Partner focus

The latest programme is part of a broader push to increase channel investment in Australia and New Zealand. Hitachi Vantara said this includes market development funds, which it said have supported year-on-year growth in net-new customer logos for both the vendor and its partners.

Yasser Elgammal, ANZ channel partner and alliances director at Hitachi Vantara, said the company was trying to make partner engagement simpler and more commercially attractive as customers update their data environments.

"Partners are central to how we grow in Australia and New Zealand," Elgammal said.

"My priority is to make Hitachi Vantara easier to partner with, more rewarding to sell with and more relevant to the growth ambitions of our partners.

"There is a significant opportunity ahead of us as customers modernise their data infrastructure to support AI, hybrid cloud and cyber resilience. Run To Win is about turning that opportunity into tangible growth for our partners by rewarding partner-sourced opportunities, accelerating our midrange business and, critically, winning more net-new customers together.

"We're investing in the partners who invest in Hitachi Vantara, and our ambition is clear: build a stronger, more profitable ecosystem where our partners grow and win alongside us."

AI readiness

The partner meetings were framed around a broader infrastructure question facing enterprise IT buyers. Hitachi Vantara cited its own research showing that 56% of Australian organisations have data practices that do not meet AI requirements, while 78% said data infrastructure complexity was growing rapidly or faster.

That helps explain the company's focus on VSP One, its unified platform for block, file and object data. According to Hitachi Vantara, the platform is designed to reduce complexity, improve resilience and make data easier to access across on-premises and cloud environments.

The emphasis on partner-sourced deals and midrange products suggests the vendor wants broader reach into day-to-day customer accounts rather than relying only on larger strategic projects. By rewarding both expansion within existing customers and wins at new accounts, the programme gives partners a direct financial incentive to pursue incremental upgrades as well as competitive displacement opportunities.

Partners who attended the sessions said the format was useful for relationship-building and product discussions. Jodie Meyerov, account manager at Perfekt, said the event combined practical interaction with technology conversations.

"The Hitachi Vantara Run To Win launch and cooking challenge was a highly interactive and inclusive event and a great opportunity to learn more about Hitachi Vantara's insights into VSP One while enjoying what we had all cooked together. It created a relaxed yet dynamic environment for some valuable conversations with our awesome Hitachi partners and peers," Meyerov said.

Anthony Burden, national sales director at a23, said the informal setting helped shape the discussions.

"It was a fantastic event and a great way to bring technology and people together in a relaxed setting. We had positive conversations, shared ideas and learned that indeed some of the best connections happen when you mix a little technology with a little cooking," Burden said.

Belinda Brooks, senior relationship manager at Triforce, said the event helped partners engage with Hitachi Vantara's wider team.

"It was great fun taking part in the launch and cooking challenge event and probably the best partner industry event I have been to in a long while. We didn't just get to cook a meal but became better acquainted with the Hitachi Vantara sales and engineering teams in addition to our day-to-day vendor partner colleagues," Brooks said.