Hitachi Digital Services lands DS Smith integration deal

Hitachi Digital Services has landed a significant contract with London-headquartered DS Smith to modernise the paper and packaging giant's integration infrastructure, highlighting the accelerating demand for legacy system transformation within manufacturing businesses.

The partnership addresses DS Smith's need to replace its aging Microsoft BizTalk platform before end-of-life support gets switched off in 2027. Rather than pursuing a simple lift-and-shift approach, DS Smith is implementing a cloud-based solution using Boomi's Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), enhanced with AI-driven automation capabilities.

The scale of this partnership is substantial, involving some 5,000 existing integrations across DS Smith's global footprint of 300 packaging centres and multiple mills. This complexity underscores both the technical challenge and revenue opportunity for Hitachi Digital Services, which will manage the complete design, implementation, and migration process.

Key components of the service include dramatically reduced integration deployment times (from months to days), enhanced system resilience through cloud architecture, and improved partner connectivity via API-first design. The AI-powered automation component positions DS Smith for operational efficiency gains while reducing maintenance overhead.

This win reinforces Hitachi Digital Services' positioning in large-scale digital transformation projects particularly within complex manufacturing environments. The partnership demonstrates the company's ability to compete for high-stakes legacy modernisation contracts, leveraging its combined IT/OT expertise and Hitachi Group's industrial heritage. For DS Smith, the investment represents a strategic necessity to maintain competitiveness in an increasingly digital packaging landscape, particularly following its recent acquisition by International Paper.

Hitachi Digital Services has developed a well-defined proposition targeting the mid-market and is differentiated around its engineering heritage and strengths in both asset heavy sectors such as manufacturing, energy and rail, as well asset light areas such as retail, hospitality and financial services (to understand more please read Hitachi Digital Services lifts the covers).

Posted by: Marc Hardwick at 08:02

Tags: contract   manufacturing