Digital oilfield

Microsoft, Halliburton, and Accenture Partner To Drive Digital Transformation

The 5-year effort will take advantage of Microsoft technologies in machine learning, augmented reality, user interactions, and the industrial Internet of things to deliver integrated solutions to the upstream industry.

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To accelerate the integration of big data with big oil, Halliburton, Microsoft, and Accenture have partnered to fuel the digitalization of oil and gas exploration and production operations.

As part of the 5-year alliance, Microsoft will work with technology innovation firm Accenture to help transition all of Halliburton's digital capabilities and business-critical applications to Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft’s proposed solutions for oil and gas, according to its website, are to “visualize reservoir simulations to increase drilling hit rates using high-performance computing, improve decision-making and reservoir production using IoT [Internet of things] drilling sensors and advanced analytics,” and to “manage and extend asset lifecycles with predictive maintenance.”

As Halliburton’s new preferred public cloud provider, Azure will deliver benefits to Halliburton’s customers by

  • Enhancing real-time platforms for expanded remote operations.
  • Improving analytics capability with the Halliburton Data Lake using machine learning and artificial intelligence.
  • Accelerating the deployment of new technology and applications for Halliburton’s overall system reliability and security.

The partnership continues the strategic alliance already formed between Halliburton and Microsoft to optimize drilling and production and lower costs for customers. Azure will handle heavy computing for the production efforts, relying on predictive deep-learning algorithms to help optimize assets in the field while enabling further exploration and reduce the time and effort spent on data collection.

The companies expect to complete the staged migration by 2022.

Halliburton joins a growing number of companies that have turned to the cloud to maximize their production capabilities. In November 2017, Microsoft became the cloud and IoT supplier for Chevron to connect operational processes through analytics and automation.