Yamaha Motor creates products that the company promises will “Rev Your Heart.” That same spirit is at the heart of Ya
maha Motor’s approach to innovate and revolutionize IT.
To keep up with rapid global demand, Yamaha needed a winning IT strategy that would transform its business processes and accelerate organization-wide innovation.
The company operates in an environment of constant change and needed an IT infrastructure that can rapidly adapt. That’s why Yamaha began working with EMC to transition the company’s IT infrastructure to a hybrid cloud.
“I believe the move towards hybrid cloud technology is the exact definition of innovation,” said Tomoyasu Aiba, group manager, Yamaha Motor IT technology strategy group, process and IT division. “Yamaha Motor does not hesitate to revolutionize IT.”
As the company began envisioning its cloud infrastructure, it needed to standardize and align its IT infrastructure to match applications and their service levels. It also needed a company that could help advance Yamaha’s IT on a global scale.
“About 80- to 90-percent of the company’s business is overseas,” said Aiba. “This means that IT systems must be rolled out globally. The motorcycle market is mainly in emerging countries and in such cases, the local infrastructure requires more support.”
By embracing EMC cloud technology, Yamaha’s IT department effectively transformed itself into a provider of IT services, now empowered to accelerate responsiveness and improve the internal service level to the end user.
With the help of EMC, Yamaha transformed its entire IT infrastructure with a long-term hybrid cloud strategy. The process started with EMC IT consultants who launched a feasibility study to outline the design of its private cloud. The design called for increasing performance and availability for business needs accordingly and others where consolidation would help reduce costs.
Through this new IT model, Yamaha reduced costs and improved the reliability and availability of applications through configuration changes to its EMC VMAX and EMC VNX storage systems in its data centers. Applications that are supported by EMC VMAX are mission-critical systems such as production management and supply chain management. Meanwhile, EMC VNX is supporting back-office applications such as human resource applications.
“The most important aspect of VMAX has been its performance and reliability,” Aiba said. “With regard to VNX, it offers both the reliability required in an enterprise system, as well as the ease of use that is required in unified storage.”
EMC products and consultants enabled Yamaha IT to consolidate 300 operational systems and create a secure private cloud that enabled more than 
600 VMware virtual servers. Yamaha IT can now respond faster to business demands by more quickly deploying virtual servers and delivering IT services that help the company’s engineering, product development, support, finance, sales and marketing teams accelerate the pace of their business, empowered by IT.
To ensure uninterrupted access and availability to valuable data and applications, the company also redesigned its back-up strategy with EMC NetWorker, EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain to back up data to an external site daily instead of monthly.
“I am really proud that our company has been able to expand globally and create excitement about the products and services it will release in the future,” Aiba said. “I think that the consulting service for total IT solutions with EMC and VMware is very important to the company’s IT success.”
