On Monday, IBM and Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AMZN.O) announced that they will collaborate to expand the reach of a set of tools used by oil firms to manage various sorts of data.
In 2018, Amazon teamed up with Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) to develop technology that converts data from more than a century of oil production, mostly based on paper records, into a standardized format that international oil corporations can use to increase efficiency across their operations.
The technology is open-source and only works in cloud computing data centers, but it is being shared across the industry. Some oil-producing countries, such as Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, do not have Amazon data centers and instead demand businesses to store their data within their borders.
IBM and Amazon both stated that they were working collaboratively to remedy the issue. Oil businesses can employ oil-industry cloud data tools in their privately-held data centers within their countries thanks to IBM’s OpenShift technology.
“The data residency requirement is virtually 50% of the oil-producing world today,” said Manish Chawla, global managing director for energy, resources, and manufacturing at IBM, in an interview. “This is a pretty significant part of the market.”
Bill Vass, vice president of engineering at AWS, said expanding the reach of the data tools would also help oil companies add non-petroleum assets such as wind and solar to their portfolios. Renewable energy requires producers to know their output at various locations at different times.
“As they transition to energy companies, it makes it easier for them, because they have all their wind data and their solar data, transmission line data, all this in there as well,” Vass said.
“You’d really don’t have a concept of how complicated the energy grid actually is until you start looking at all these different ways” of transmitting energy.
