CyberTech Top Voice: Interview with Tammy Gollotti, SVP Global Marketing at Hitachi Vantara

Hello, CyberTech community. Welcome to part #28 of the CyberTech Top Voice interview series with Tammy Gollotti, SVP Global Marketing at Hitachi Vantara.

In this edition of the CyberTech Top Voice interview series, we sit down with Tammy Gollotti, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Hitachi Vantara. With over 20 years of experience leading marketing teams at global tech giants such as Cisco, AT&T, and Sprint, Tammy brings a wealth of expertise in driving brand awareness, customer loyalty, and demand generation strategies. In this conversation, she shares her insights on the evolving marketing landscape, the role of generative AI in modern campaigns, and Hitachi Vantara’s focus on data management and cyber resilience. Join us as we explore how Tammy’s innovative leadership is shaping the future of marketing in the tech industry.

Get ready to dive into a conversation filled with cutting-edge insights and visionary marketing strategies as we welcome Tammy Gollotti, SVP of Global Marketing at Hitachi Vantara, to the CyberTech Top Voice series!

Hi Tammy, Welcome to the CyberTech Top Voice interview series. Please tell us about your role at Hitachi Vantara and how you arrived here.

As the senior vice president of global marketing at Hitachi Vantara, I oversee the company’s branding, marketing and communications programs – ensuring a cross-functional integrated Marketing strategy that aligns to our business goals and objectives and plays a critical role in fueling the company’s growth goals. I lead a talented team of marketing and communications professionals who help me drive brand awareness, shape market perception, and pipeline revenue. My focus is on making sure our marketing strategies are data-driven and help us generate demand, build customer loyalty, and create a strong employee experience.

I’ve been in this industry for more than 20 years, taking on leadership roles in brand, marketing, corporate positioning, global communications, and sales at companies like Flex, Cisco Systems, AT&T and Sprint. Throughout my career, I’ve seen firsthand how powerful marketing and communications can be as a growth engine, and I’m passionate about using them to help companies stand out and thrive.

You have led exceptional marketing and branding teams in your career. What has changed in the demand generation tactics and approach in the last 4 years?

The demand generation landscape has undergone a substantial transformation in the last four years, largely influenced by the increasing sophistication of buyers and the ever-evolving digital environment. Buyers have many more options for gathering information.

In fact, 97% check vendor websites before engaging with sales, and according to Gartner, it takes on average 20 touches with a client before a prospect becomes a potentially successful lead for a sales team.  Two of the most significant changes are the increased use of data insights in key marketing areas to better target campaigns and programs, and the primacy of high-quality, valuable content to build trust early in the buyer’s journey.

With information overload being a constant challenge, generic marketing noise is easily ignored. Prospects are now actively seeking educational resources, third-party thought leadership and peer insights to inform their decisions. This has necessitated a shift towards audience-first, where we focus on meeting buyers where they are with targeted content that provides real value through webinars, whitepapers, customer videos, and interactive experiences that address specific pain points related to data management and AI/Analytics.

It’s also worth noting that the digital landscape continues to fragment, requiring a more nuanced and multi-channeled as well as integrated approach. While traditional channels still play a role, we’ve seen a surge in the importance of targeted surround sound methods that include digital advertising, blending organic and paid media that engage communities, and utilizing social platforms as an avenue to establish authentic connection and lead nurturing often before, during and after a physical event or product or services launch to build awareness and generate leads.

The industry’s emphasis on an integrated customer experience and the need to cut through the noise have made building trust and providing genuine value through relevant content critical to engagement and to successful demand generation today.

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Could you tell us more about your partnership ecosystem? How does your marketing effort add value to partnerships and integrations such as those announced with FarmaMondo or La Molisana?

Hitachi Vantara fosters a robust partner ecosystem designed to drive innovation, sustainability, and business growth. This ecosystem comprises strategic alliances with technology leaders, service providers and resellers, all collaborating to deliver comprehensive solutions that address diverse customer needs.

Recent partnership updates with Cisco, NVIDIA and Red Hat, are a testament to our work in bringing together industry-leading expertise to deliver compelling, transformative technology to help our customers succeed.

By leveraging strategic partnerships and targeted marketing efforts with and through partners, Hitachi Vantara continues to co-create value, drive sustainability, and deliver transformative solutions to our customers worldwide.

What kind of impact have you experienced with GenAI in your marketing campaigns?

Like many businesses, generative AI is in the early stages of making a notable impact on our marketing efforts across our portfolio of AI, hybrid cloud, and cybersecurity and data protection. We’re using AI in a variety of use cases within Marketing for internal productivity and external value.  These areas consist of thematic competitive assessments across digital channels to quickly gain insights and make modifications to our marketing tactics, generating various content formats, which allows us to produce a greater volume of materials and reach a wider audience, AI-powered mobile tools for sales enablement to serve up easily digestible content from different form factors like PowerPoints, videos, and white papers and our Partner Marketing Portal which generates co-branded materials, personalized and verticalized content and readily updates Partner sites with fresh content.  We are also testing Agents on our support and global website for a variety of inquiries to offload technical support for more complex issues and to generate leads. AI is also helping us adapt our content to different communication channels, ensuring a consistent, efficient, and effective message across platforms.

Since we are a technology data company, I believe strongly in using a technology like AI to find unique ways of market to and engage our customers, prospects and employees. We’re still in the early stages for many areas, but the potential clear. We can find the value-added areas where my employees can be creative and use strategic thinking and let AI do the repetitive and expedient tasks needed to move quickly in this dynamic market such as data insights automation, campaign execution, translation, and much more.

What does Hitachi Vantara’s 2025 marketing roadmap look like? How much of this roadmap is influenced by topics and events related to cyber resilience and data management?

AI and GenAI are advancing at breakneck speed, pushing traditional data infrastructure to its limits. Our customers demand more from technology and innovation, and marketing of these advancements has never been more critical to get right. For example, last year, IT leaders expected data storage to double within two years. Already, their needs have nearly tripled as the average large organization now holds 150 petabytes (PB) of data. By the end of 2026, they expect to be storing over 300PB. All of that data is critical to fuelling AI initiatives, which means it must be accurate and requires robust data protection and governance, as more businesses progress past the trial phase of AI and expect ROI to become a top priority.

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To address this, Hitachi Vantara is strategically enhancing its projects and product development to highlight the critical link between a hybrid cloud foundation for data management and the AI projects of the future. For example, to assist organizations in identifying high-value AI opportunities, Hitachi Vantara offers an AI Discovery Service in a joint effort with our sister group company, Global Logic. This service helps clients pinpoint the most beneficial AI use cases, assess data and infrastructure readiness, and develop a strategic roadmap for effective AI implementation, ensuring a clear path to achieving ROI.
The Hitachi iQ portfolio delivers AI-ready infrastructure and solutions designed for performance, scalability and resilience. It provides unified data access across environments, facilitating efficient AI operations and accelerating the realization of ROI from AI investments. At NVIDIA GTC this year, we introduced the Hitachi iQ M Series, a modular design with hybrid cloud data orchestration tailored for generative AI and industry-specific workloads. This infrastructure offers enhanced reliability and performance, enabling organizations to transition from AI development to tangible ROI more swiftly.

Overall, Hitachi Vantara advises organizations to prioritize AI projects with clear objectives and measurable outcomes. By focusing on initiatives that address core business challenges, companies can achieve faster and more significant benefits, ensuring resources are allocated to projects with the highest potential for ROI.

How do you stay on top of technology updates, trends, and research? Could you highlight how platforms such as CyberTech Insights could benefit decision-makers and researchers?

Hitachi Vantara utilizes various resources to stay on top of today’s fast-paced technology sector, including gaining insights from our CSO and peer network, analyst reports and engagements, news media, podcasts, webinars, conferences and speaking events, and most importantly, listening to our customers, partners and workforce experiences.

We know that businesses are focused on data protection and proper governance, and in that respect, CyberTech Insights provides a reputable expert knowledge base, market intelligence and a plethora of cyber security best practices that can help corporate leaders, marketers and IT professionals make better informed, proactive decisions as they formulate and execute their strategies in this ever-evolving digital landscape.

How does Hitachi Vantara plan to continue evolving its data infrastructure technologies to stay ahead of emerging threats in the ever-changing landscape of digital deception?

Hitachi Vantara is proactively enhancing its data infrastructure technologies to address the evolving landscape of digital threats. By integrating immutable storage, 100% data availability guarantees and AI-powered security, Hitachi Vantara delivers a holistic approach to cyber resilience—helping organizations safeguard data, maintain compliance and ensure business continuity.

Immutable Snapshots for Ransomware Protection is built into Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One), offering secure, write-once-read-many storage for unbreakable data protection. Immutable snapshots ensure that data cannot be altered or deleted by ransomware attacks or insider threats. Even if an attacker gains access to the system, they cannot modify or erase the data, enabling secure recovery.

With our 100% data availability guarantee and rapid recovery, Hitachi Vantara guarantees continuous data availability with enterprise-grade storage redundancy, built-in failover mechanisms and automated disaster recovery. Organizations can operate without downtime, ensuring mission-critical systems remain online even during disruptions.

Additionally, AI-driven anomaly detection and malware scanning work in real time, integrated with our seven-layer defense-in-depth strategy to enhance data resilience. AI models continuously analyze data access patterns, flagging unusual activities indicative of ransomware, insider threats, or malicious data exfiltration. This early detection allows security teams to take proactive actions before threats escalate.

Hitachi Vantara’s focus on cyber resiliency further emphasizes the importance of data protection and provides solutions that ensure business continuity and rapid recovery from cyber incidents. We also collaborate withstrategic partners, such as industry leaders like Veeam, to enhance backup, recovery and ransomware detection capabilities, offering comprehensive data protection solutions to our customers. Through these initiatives, Hitachi Vantara aims to stay ahead of emerging threats and support organizations in safeguarding their critical data assets.

What are your predictions for the future of AI and hybrid cloud?

As AI adoption matures, organizations will move from rapid experimentation to a results-driven approach, where ROI becomes a key factor. AI-ready infrastructure is critical to this shift – ensuring data platforms can support evolving AI needs. Enterprises will take a pragmatic approach, starting with problem identification and aligning data and infrastructure to deliver measurable results.

Hybrid cloud adoption will continue to increase as businesses refine their cloud strategies, navigating the scalability of public cloud with on-premises infrastructure. Organizations will modernize their on-premises environments to stay competitive by utilizing agile solutions like software-defined storage and S3 object storage, accompanied by automated control planes to build private cloud ecosystems. Additionally, the changes in the virtual machine licensing model will drive greater adoption of containerized applications and open-source solutions.  Finally, infrastructure as a Service will become even more critical offering businesses flexibility in how they purchase their infrastructure and managed services. 

Tag a person from the industry whose answers you would like to see in this series:

Within the Hitachi family, I would be interested in hearing from Roger Lvin, who is the CEO of Hitachi Digital Services, as well as the Executive Director of Hitachi Cyber.

Outside of Hitachi, I would love to hear from Nicole Perlroth, who for many years was a cybersecurity reporter for The New York Times before moving into professional roles as a cyber investor, evangelist, and advisor.

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Thank you, Tammy, for speaking to us. We look forward to having you again at our Top Voice programs.

To participate in our interviews, please write to our CyberTech Media Room at sudipto@intentamplify.com