Chevron is making Microsoft Azure its primary cloud provider as part of a seven year partnership with the Redmond giant.
The energy corporation added the move will accelerate the application of technologies such as analytics and the Internet of Things to drive performance and improve efficiencies. According to Chevron CIO Bill Braun, the company saw Microsoft as a good fit because of its global reach.
The move is especially key because of the bountiful amounts of data energy companies, among others in similar industries, are harvesting. In Chevron’s case, its ‘things’ – in this instance, production facilities, drill ships and fiber optic cables inside well casings – can generate up to one terabyte of data per day. Through the partnership with Microsoft, Chevron hopes to act upon this data in real-time and apply analytics on top of it.
“Chevron has a long history of applying advanced technologies to develop the energy that improves lives and powers the world. We also understand scale, and the cloud at hyperscale is something we intend to leverage for agility and efficiency,” said Braun in a statement. “Through this strategic partnership, we believe Chevron will have a competitive advantage.”
“With Chevron and Microsoft, intelligent energy meets intelligent cloud,” said Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure. “Our global cloud infrastructure – which has more regions around the world than any other cloud provider – will enable Chevron to leverage our capabilities across areas like high performance computing and Internet of Things to become a truly digital business.”
Microsoft posted its most recent financial results last week with total revenues of $24.5 billion. In the three buckets the company places revenues, its ‘intelligent cloud’ segment – focusing on Azure and server products – saw a 13% increase year on year to $6.9bn for the quarter while ‘productivity and business processes’, where Office 365 figures are based, went up 28% to $8.2bn.
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