Hitachi streamlined three of its previous operations under the new Vantara subsidiary, which at the same time bolstered container support inside two cloud products through deals with VMware and Mesosphere.

The new Hitachi Vantara operation takes over from what were Hitachi’s Data Systems, Insight Group, and Pentaho software businesses. The new entity is focused on data services, with the company also pointing to ongoing opportunities in the Internet of Things (IoT) space.

Hitachi Vantara will include around 7,000 employees and inherits a combined $4 billion in yearly revenues. The firm is expected to compete more directly against the likes of Lenovo, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, and Dell EMC.

Heading up Hitachi Vantara are a number of former Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) executives, including CEO Ryuichi Otsuki, President and COO Brian Householder, CTO Scott Kelly, and CIO Renée McKaskle.

Bobbi Soni, Hitachi Vantara's chief solutions and services officer, hinted to Fortune that the company would not compete against established cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

"This is all about standing up end-to-end solutions that can run on-premises or on Azure or Amazon," Soni said. "Our strategy is to bring industrial IoT expertise, our software, and ability to manage and run technology. We don't think many companies are in a position to pull all those things together."

HDS in June updated its object storage technology, adding more storage capacity and improving file sharing and data management. The subsidiary also added file synchronization and sharing capabilities (think: a secure, private Dropbox), and data analytics.

Hitachi Vantara’s push also included a pair of cloud platform updates with a focus on increased container support.

The company’s Enterprise Cloud product gained support from VMware’s vRealize 7.3 Automation platform. This allows for automated control over the creation, deployment, and management of container hosts and cloud-native applications-as-a-service in multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments.

Developers are provided with container templates that support persistent volumes, container networking, and host and image repository management. Developers can also add dynamic networks or micro-segmentation, with administrators able to manage the container host infrastructure with service level agreement (SLA) oversight.

VMware’s vRealize product is a cloud management and orchestration platform targeted at heterogeneous and hybrid clouds. The automation component adds increased control of containers and their hosts.

Hitachi initially launched its Enterprise Cloud product last year, along with the initial VRealize support.

Gary Breder, director of cloud and services product marketing at Hitachi Vantara, said the platform is targeted at organizations "that run traditional applications that are virtualized with VMware and want to begin leveraging containers for additional flexibility and cost reduction."

"These organizations have historically been private cloud based that are now looking to complement these resources with public cloud," Breder said.

Hitachi also unveiled its Enterprise Cloud Container Platform, which is the second member of its broader Enterprise Cloud line. The new offering taps Mesosphere’s DC/OS product to offer various container management services. This brings those management options in house and is designed to reduce reliance on public cloud resources for container deployment.

The platform includes more than 50 preconfigured container applications, and options for persistent storage and private repository. These options provide developers with quicker access to images needed to deploy a container and a more secure database from which to draw those images.

"This is a best fit for those organizations that are developing and running applications that are entirely born on the web," Breder explained. "These organizations have historically been public cloud based that are now looking to complement these resources with private cloud in a way that replicates the public cloud environment."

Mesosphere earlier this month announced plans to support industry leading container orchestrator Kubernetes. The move allows users to connect into containers running on Kubernetes. It also allows infrastructure owners to offer Kubernetes for Docker container orchestration through an “as-a-service” model via the shared DC/OS infrastructure.

Breder said the company's platform inherits support for Docker and Kubernetes through both VMware vRealize and Mesosphere.

The Hitachi Vantara deal also deepens Mesosphere’s work with integrators, which includes HPE, Cisco, Dell EMC, and Microsoft.

Customers can access both container products through an early adoption program ahead of general availability.