SAN FRANCISCO –

Hitachi Ltd.'s information-technology services division will spend this year absorbing several recent data-management acquisitions and will limit further purchases to small outfits, according to an executive with the company.

The division, Hitachi Data Systems, plans to spend the rest of this year helping its partners sell the products resulting from the recent deals, Kevin Eggleston, the unit's senior vice president of social innovation and global industries, said in an interview.

"There's potential for some more acquisitions," he said. "If we do anything, it'll be more around the systems-integration capability to add to our services, but that's yet to be determined."

Hitachi is Japan's fourth-largest provider of global IT services, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Santa Clara, California-based division acquired data-analysis tools company Pentaho Corp. and several other data-management businesses in the past year.

It also has worked with Hortonworks Inc. to develop data-analysis software.

The moves were meant to help Hitachi Data Systems sell companies more sophisticated products for managing large amounts of data, Eggleston said.

Any further acquisitions would be for less than what Hitachi paid for Pentaho, he said. That deal was for between $500 million and $600 million, a source familiar with the matter said at the time.

One of the main ways the division makes money is by working with large-scale systems integrators that resell its products to big companies. Hitachi may acquire companies in the field to help train its partners how to sell the new products, Eggleston said.

"If we can't do it and show them how to do it, it makes it a lot harder," he said.

This year, "we're going to be more focused on executing with what we have," he said. "We may make some small acquisitions, that's yet to be seen. Anything major would be in 2016 or beyond."