Oilfield services major Halliburton and Microsoft have announced plans to enter into a partnership to combine and thereby strengthen their digital offering for the oil and gas industry.
Through this alliance Microsoft is seeking to combine its expertise in cloud and digital technologies with Halliburton’s exhaustive range of oilfield services.
“Halliburton is focussed on delivering intelligent cloud solutions to drive the next generation of efficient oil and gas exploration and production,” Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, said.
“We are excited to bring the power of Azure’s hyperscale, hybrid and global cloud platform technologies to this alliance to enhance the value chain for our mutual customers,” Zander was quoted as saying in a press release received by arabianoilandgas.com.
Researchers and engineers from both companies will leverage and optimise Microsoft technologies in machine learning, augmented reality (AR), user interactions and Industrial Internet of Things, as well as Azure’s infrastructure and built-in computing capabilities to deliver tightly integrated solutions across the energy value chain.
Areas of collaboration between the two companies include: applying deep learning to reservoir characterisation, modelling and simulation, building domain-specific visualisation for mixed reality, creating interactive applications and fueling the digitalisation of E&P assets.
As a first step in the alliance, Halliburton has made DecisionSpace 365 available on Azure, enabling real-time data streaming from IoT edge devices in oilfields and the ability to apply deep-learning models to optimise drilling and production to lower costs for customers.
With the power of DecisionSpace on Azure, big compute and predictive deep-learning algorithms will help optimise field assets and enable next-generation exploration and deep-earth models by using software to fill gaps in sensor data, while reducing the number of steps and time required to render models.
“Halliburton is at the forefront of the digital transformation occurring in the E&P industry,” Nagaraj Srinivasan, senior vice president of Landmark and Halliburton Digital Solutions, said. “We believe open architecture and community-based innovation are necessary to drive this fundamental change and we’re proud to work closely with an industry leader like Microsoft to deliver tailored E&P digital business solutions to our customers across the globe.”
This strategic collaboration will allow the companies to apply voice and image recognition, video processing and AR/Virtual Reality to create a digital representation of a physical asset using Microsoft’s HoloLens and Surface devices.
Additionally, the companies will utilise digital representation for oil wells and pumps at the IoT edge using the Landmark Field Appliance and Azure Stack.
Microsoft Azure will also become Halliburton’s preferred public cloud provider for iEnergy, the oil and gas industry’s first global E&P cloud linking the oilfield to the control centre.
