2008 was a year of growth for Hitachi and the company is keeping its hopes high for 2009. After years focusing on the enterprise end of the market, Hitachi has decided to expand its SMB presence with the recent announcement of partnerships with distributors Express Data and Softsource.“We really needed to expand our medium to small business market,” commented Brent Wilkinson, Hitachi Data Systems’ General Manager for New Zealand.  This year will be dedicated to marketing the Hitachi brand, always in conjunction with channel partners, according to Wilkinson. “It’s a combination of getting the brand out there and finding opportunities for partners and supporting them,” explained the GM, adding that one of the good things about Hitachi is that it’s channel-only (“We don’t do any direct sales.”). The storage market seems to be surviving the economic downturn. According to a survey conducted by Hitachi, data storage is a top priority for enterprises even in the wake of the current financial crisis. The results of the survey show that 88% of the CIOs interviewed confirmed this fact and unanimously agreed that IT is embedded closely in all business operations, which makes leveraging IT efficiently a critical task. “In these uncertain economic times, the reality is IT budgets will continue to get scrutinised, even though data continues to grow rapidly and expectations on service levels continue to increase on IT. Hitachi Data Systems is committed to partnering with customers to help them ‘do more with less’ and win in the downturn,” said Tim Smith, Senior Marketing Manager, Hitachi Data Systems ANZ.