IBM, Amazon team up to help oil and gas companies speed up energy transition

IBM and Amazon Inc.'s Amazon Web Services announced on Monday, Nov. 15, that they have signed a deal to work together on helping oil and gas companies in managing different kinds of data.

According to Reuters, Amazon already worked with Royal Dutch Shell, an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas firm headquartered in The Hague in the Netherlands, in 2018. Amazon's IT service management subsidiary helped Shell in creating a technology that converts data from over a hundred years of oil production into a standard format so multinational oil firms could boost efficiency across their operations.

Most of these data were recorded on paper, so a century's worth of documents is surely difficult to manage. For this, the International Business Machines Corp. and Amazon Web Services will keep the data safe and make them readily available when needed through technology.

It was said that the tool is being shared industry-wide on an open-source basis, and it only works in cloud computing data centers. IBM and Amazon said they would collaborate to help solve the issue of data storage and lack of data centers.

The team will use OpenShift, an IBM technology, where oil companies can utilize the oil business cloud data tools in their privately-owned data centers within their countries. This will hasten the reduction of data roadblocks within the industry. It was added that the IBM Open Data for trades is an open-source solution that uses the OSDU data foundation for the oil, gas, and energy industries.

"Much of the data needed to solve the complex energy challenges, such as superior subsurface decisions, already exists, yet is untapped. This is because one of the greatest values of that data is derived when it can be effectively combined, but usually, this data is locked by data residency requirements, legacy applications or proprietary data formats," Amazon's AWS' vice president of engineering, Bill Vass, said in a press release. "By collaborating with IBM and leveraging Red Hat OpenShift, we will be able to offer customers a global, seamless offering with the flexibility to run on virtually any IT infrastructure and drive longer-term digital innovation."

Finally, Manish Chawla, IBM's global managing director on energy, resources, and manufacturing, added that their team-up with AWS is tackling the need to make it easier for energy clients to access their data easily as well as provide the business with an adaptable solution to meet the challenges of today as the industry evolves.