ITOCHU Corporation (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Yoshihisa Suzuki, President & COO; hereinafter “ITOCHU”) announced today that it has released the next-generation company-wide integrated data infrastructure (Data Lake), which supports Smart Management, a basic policy under the medium-term management plan, and the “improvement of management productivity through new technologies” for reinventing business.This release is the first step in the total renewal of mission-critical systems, which began operating in fiscal 2002. The renewal is aimed at ensuring the “earn, cut, prevent” principles of day-to-day business, expanding functions consistent with the further deepening of consolidated management in the future and supporting the Reinvented Business and Reinvented Work-Styles under the policy of “Next-Generation Merchant” detailed in the medium-term management plan.

For this release, ITOCHU built the next-generation company-wide integrated data infrastructure (Data Lake), which is capable of not only processing data more rapidly but also supporting business data analysis more quickly and flexibly, in anticipation of the arrival of the digital transformation era. In addition to accounting data, all the data related to business transactions will be integrated into the data infrastructure so as to provide reports and business data corresponding to needs with high added value through future forecasts and other measures. At the same time, ITOCHU established the Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC), an organization specializing in data analysis and utilization support. BICC will support divisions in the front lines in their flexible utilization of data.

Toward fiscal 2020, ITOCHU will continue to enhance new functions that support business efficiency improvement and business upgrades by making achievements including the real-time processing of sales information and financial results information for faster, upgraded management decision-making, the upgrading of consolidated credit management, the diversification of foreign currency funding, and the efficiency improvement of payment, clearing and settlement processing using AI.

The next-generation mission-critical system employs CUVICmc2 (*1), the cloud service specializing in mission-critical systems offered by ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (headquartered in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Satoshi Kikuchi, President & CEO) ; hereinafter “CTC”), which has enabled faster system development, testing and other processes. Once a large-scale mission-critical system is built, it is used for a long time. It is therefore important that the system should be equipped for changes associated with changes in the business environment. In addition to designing the system to respond flexibly to the requirements of the divisions, ITOCHU has made it stable in terms of operation as well, in consideration of the mechanism for periodical system updates for responding to version upgrades of products and the reduction of verification tasks in the testing process that are undertaken by using tools. Moving forward, we will try to cut costs, including the costs for operation after deployment, by using the usage volume rate structure in accordance with the actual operational volume. In addition, ITOCHU is the first sogo shosha in Japan to introduce the next-generation ERP (*2) SAP® S/4 HANA, and the data processing speed has been increased by database in-memory technology.


As a pioneer in the new sogo shosha era using next-generation information systems, ITOCHU aims to be the No. 1 trading company pursuing effectiveness and efficiency in information application.