Schlumberger, IBM, and Red Hat announced a collaboration intended to accelerate digital transformation across the oil and gas industry. The joint initiative will expand access to Schlumberger’s Delfi exploration and production cloud-based applications by use of IBM’s hybrid-cloud technology and Red Hat's OpenShift container platform.
“Together, we will expand and evolve an environment where energy professionals in all countries across the globe can collaborate using data and new software applications for digital innovation,” said Trygve Randen, Schlumberger’s global director for digital subsurface solutions.
Initially, the collaboration will focus on two areas. The first is the hybrid-cloud deployment of Delfi enabled by the OpenShift platform to expand access for customers. The hybrid-cloud concept uses a mix of public and private servers to store data and applications.
“We have shown that adopting a hybrid-cloud architecture can be 2.5 times more valuable than relying on public cloud alone,” said Manish Chawla, IBM’s global managing director for energy and natural resources. “Red Hat’s OpenShift allows customers to containerize their applications—essentially, to encapsulate them and make them cloud-portable. So, instead of needing to rewrite software code for each cloud provider, the code can be written once and encapsulated for use in any technology setup. That includes traditional data centers as well as public, private, and edge clouds. It helps open up a truly global market.”
The second focus area will be the first hybrid-cloud implementation of the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU).
The OSDU “is a cross-industry collaboration to develop a common, industry-standard, and open basis for oil and gas data,” Randen said. “Its output is free code as well as data standards that companies, organizations, or specialist providers can use.” Schlumberger joined the Open Group’s OSDU Forum in 2019.
One hurdle for sharing data so widely is some governments’ requirement that data that originated within their countries remain there, a concept known as data sovereignty. This new hosting configuration is expected to facilitate in-country deployments and maintain compliance with these regulations.
“In many locations across the world, companies are not fully able to leverage the scalability of the public cloud. This may be due to one of several reasons: government requirements to keep data in-country; inconsistent quality and reliability of telecoms networks between an office and a cloud data center; and, in some cases, the distance between office and data center, which can degrade the software performance experienced by the end user,” Randen said. “Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform will enable the Delfi environment to be deployed on a much, much wider selection of public and private cloud options. Practically, this means customers can now access Delfi in locations that previously were not possible.”
“The energy industry is transforming as organizations look for efficient new ways to power their operations, adopt digital technologies to create a competitive advantage, and innovate and integrate work flows to make faster and better decisions,” said Paul Cormier, president and chief executive officer at Red Hat. “A hybrid-cloud foundation built on open source offers the flexibility, acceleration, and innovation this digital transformation requires.”
The organizations said they intend to further their collaboration with the creation of a differentiated data-management and operations solution for OSDU, which they said will enable oil and gas operators to build, deploy, and transition digital solutions with hybrid-cloud data infrastructures.