Halliburton, Microsoft to drive O&G digital transformation

Tech company Microsoft and oil services provider Halliburton have entered into a strategic alliance aiming to drive digital transformation across the oil and gas industry.

Halliburton said earlier this week that the relationship would combine the expertise of a software company with cloud and digital transformation experience with its exploration and production (E&P) science, software, and services experience.

Jason Zander, corporate VP of Microsoft Azure, said: “Halliburton is focused on delivering intelligent cloud solutions to drive the next generation of efficient oil and gas exploration and production. 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.”

According to the company, researchers and engineers from both companies will leverage and optimize Microsoft technologies in machine learning, augmented reality (AR), user interactions, and Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), as well as Azure’s high-performant infrastructure and built-in computing capabilities to deliver tightly integrated solutions across the energy value chain.

Areas of collaboration between Microsoft and Halliburton include applying deep learning to reservoir characterization, modeling, and simulation, building domain-specific visualization for mixed reality, creating highly interactive applications, and fueling the digitalization of E&P assets.

As a first step in the alliance, Halliburton made DecisionSpace 365 available on Azure, enabling real-time data streaming from IoT devices in oil fields and the ability to apply deep-learning models to optimize drilling and production to, according to the service provider, lower costs for customers.

The partners hope that DecisionSpace on Azure would help optimize 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.

Nagaraj Srinivasan, senior VP of Landmark and Halliburton Digital Solutions, added: “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.”

Also, the collaboration will allow the companies to apply voice and image recognition, video processing and augmented and virtual reality to create a digital representation of a physical asset using Microsoft’s HoloLens and Surface devices.

Additionally, the companies will utilize 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 oil field to the office.