Bharti Patel is SVP, Head of Engineering at Hitachi Vantara, heading the company's cutting-edge data and infrastructure product offerings. She was previously CTO at Austin-based Alen where she led digital transformation and exponential growth for medical-grade HEPA air purification systems. Prior to that, she spent 20 years at IBM where she led large global R&D teams across ecommerce, mobility, client platforms, and – most notably – data and storage management. While she is proud to say she is a developer at heart, Patel is best known for her passion for driving innovation that creates exceptional customer experiences. Now back in the data space, Patel is leveraging Hitachi's long-term history in AI and domain specific data to embed generative AI to further differentiate the company's next gen infrastructure systems.

As organizations transition to data-driven business models, they become keepers of immense and ever-growing amounts of data, which they must store, protect, and analyze. For many this is a sizable challenge: 80% of respondents to a survey by 451 Research said they work with more than 100 data sources. Their existing systems also struggle to keep pace: 30% of respondents said it takes their organization more than a week to go from data to insights. Consequently, most organizations face a long list of data-related challenges. They must get their arms around a massive volume of data, ranging from historical to real-time.