Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, Ltd. has announced plans to buy Herndon, Virginia-based REAN Cloud for an undisclosed sum.

This acquisition will “reinforce Hitachi Vantara’s ability to accelerate secure enterprise cloud adoption across multicloud environments and strengthen its ability to manage and operate traditional applications as well as emerging workloads in artificial intelligence and machine learning”, Hitachi said in a release on Tuesday.

Hitachi Vantara was formed in 2017 through a merger of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho.

The company highlighted REAN’s “deep hyperscale expertise and industry-leading infrastructure-as-code REAN Cloud Accelerator Platform” as key assets of interest.

hitachiDeal Comes after REAN Stripped of  Pentagon Contract

The acquisition, advised on the Hitachi side by Citi, and on the REAN side by William Blair and MVP, comes some eight weeks after REAN was stripped of a $950 million “other transaction authority,” or OTA, contract it had been awarded in February to migrate the Pentagon’s portfolio of legacy applications to the cloud.

Rivals including Oracle had criticized the fast-tracking of a contract of the size and demanded a full competitive tender. Others feared the award would tilt the Pentagon’s search for a commercial cloud provider in favour of REAN Cloud’s partner, AWS.

REAN Rated by Gartner

The company’s Chief Solutions Officer, Bobby Soni, said in a post published on Tuesday, that: “REAN [are] one of the few [companies] that can support the entire cloud services life cycle… They are quite the company!”

He pointed to REAN’s status of AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Microsoft Azure Silver Partner, along with its inclusion in research house Gartner’s magic quadrant for public cloud infrastructure as attractions.

“With 47Lining’s capabilities [a machine learning and big data company acquired by REAN Cloud last year], REAN Cloud also delivers customized solutions for IoT analytics, predictive analytics and machine learning, allowing customers to more quickly unlock new business opportunities.”

“Our global customers across the Hitachi, Ltd., ecosystem are driving their own digital transformations to create competitive advantages in the marketplace,” said Brian Householder, chief executive officer of Hitachi Vantara.

“Modernized infrastructure running both on and off premises and intelligent data governance and analytics are the foundational pillars of digital transformations. REAN Cloud powerfully extends Hitachi Ltd.’s existing portfolio for customers and partners in these areas.”