Announcing Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy: Enable your data to do more in the cloud
Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy is now available in preview. This new Microsoft offering, jointly developed with SLB, is an enterprise-grade, OSDU™ Data Platform solution that enables the efficient development of software applications for energy companies, powered by Microsoft’s secure and trusted cloud services and SLB’s extensive domain expertise
Starting today, customers can sign up for Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy to enable their data to do more on the cloud.
Driven by population and economic growth, global energy demand is expected to increase nearly 50 percent over the next 30 years.1 This growth will need to be balanced with building a global net zero carbon economy while providing safe, secure, reliable, affordable, and cleaner energy for all organizations and individuals. In the face of global change, energy companies are embarking on a journey of rapid transformation driven by cloud, data, and AI, to establish a digital foundation that powers a more sustainable, lower-carbon future.
To support decision-making, energy companies use simulation models based on large volumes of complex data gathered from diverse sources. Yet disparate technology platforms can hinder productivity, and professionals are losing valuable time to disconnected systems and data. Energy professionals spend large amounts of time searching for data and verifying provenance and geoscientists spend time waiting for and managing information. In addition, data has also been bound to proprietary applications, making it difficult to integrate solutions and data for analysis and collaboration.
Azure Data Manager for Energy is an enterprise-grade data platform that breaks down these data silos. The solution brings together the power, security, and scalability of an integrated and open cloud built in alignment with the OSDU Technical Standard in a fully-managed solution that simplifies implementation and speeds time-to-market.
Azure Data Manager for Energy, together with our partners who innovate on top of it, will help customers migrate their largest data workloads to the cloud and:
- Drive actionable insights.
- Gain global scalability.
- Increase operational efficiency.
Drive actionable insights
The sheer amount of time spent managing data is a challenge for the industry. Exploration licenses often have strict time limits and data bottlenecks can be a problem when set against those deadlines. Customers who use Azure Data Manager for Energy spend less time collecting and validating data and more time on strategic analysis and decision-making. With Azure Data Manager for Energy, data ingestion and management are more automated, and geoscientists can support strategic decision-making with cleaner, more accessible data on a prebuilt platform to build high-quality technology solutions.
Gain global scalability
Digital transformation demands that forward-looking organizations move to a secure, enterprise-grade cloud to stay competitive. With Azure Data Manager for Energy, customers can manage compute-intensive workloads at a global scale in an enterprise-ready environment, including streaming large datasets used by mission-critical domain applications. Best of all, this new solution is open and flexible, giving developers the ability to build on and customize. Longer term, energy customers can expand capabilities through an expansive ecosystem of additional industry applications and innovations from our partners.
With Azure Data Manager for Energy, customers also benefit from the long-term investments Microsoft has made in cybersecurity. As energy companies rapidly digitize and implement new technology, they need sophisticated tools to stay ahead of and safeguard against current and emerging threats. Protecting a large, geographically distributed environment with potentially thousands of endpoints can be challenging. To improve resilience and reduce cyber risk, organizations need to optimize visibility and respond quickly and effectively to threats across all their internet of things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) networks. At Microsoft, we understand the risks and complexity energy companies face around threat detection and management, and are committed to providing organizations with insight and control they need to secure all their endpoints.
Increase operational efficiency
Energy companies’ profit margins can vary significantly with large fluctuations in energy prices. The high costs of exploration, production, and data acquisition can be mitigated with effective data management. Organizations are also seeking faster, more accurate data insights to increase operational efficiency while meeting compliance requirements.
Azure Data Manager for Energy is a vendor-agnostic, open data platform that can integrate with virtually any data set, application, or cloud service. With this solution, energy companies can deploy standard industry-compatible data schemas quickly, offering up insights to decision-makers and providing employees more time for value-added activities. This agility, combined with the scale, security, and performance of the Microsoft Cloud means that customers can easily implement solutions that improve agility and optimize workflows.
One customer using Azure Data Manager for Energy to increase operational efficiency is Equinor, Norway’s state-owned energy provider. Equinor is transforming their company toward a net zero future and needs to remain competitive while diversifying its energy mix to include more renewables, hydrogen, and carbon capture. Cleaner, connected data makes it easier for business units to collaborate, reduce costs, and save time on projects. Equinor’s adoption of an open, enterprise-grade data platform service on the Microsoft Cloud will be an important part of their energy transition because it enables faster access to actionable data, efficient workflows, and innovations in renewables and lower carbon solutions.
Data management for energy companies is unwieldy and can be expensive. Despite the massive data sets these organizations have acquired over decades, only a fraction of that data might be practically usable at any given time. Untapped and siloed assets make data management more costly and increase the likelihood of expensive repurchases. Azure Data Manager for Energy helps customers accelerate time-to-market and reduce implementation costs with easy integration and built-in tools that simplify development.
Microsoft and SLB partner to accelerate energy technologies
Azure Data Manager for Energy is an exciting new aspect of the partnership between Microsoft and SLB and our commitment to building open and extensible cloud-native data solutions for the energy industry. In 2021, the two companies announced an expanded strategic partnership with the goal of accelerating new technologies for the energy industry and have been co-innovating to enable faster and secure digital transformation.
At their 2022 Digital Forum in Luzern, SLB announced the availability of the SLB Enterprise Data Solution, a fully comprehensive data management toolkit exclusively available on Azure Data Manager for Energy.
“Our industry has invested heavily into acquiring data, however, extracting its full value has been hindered by the challenge of data silos. This means decisions have not always been based on the most up-to-date or highest quality data. With the rapid evolution of AI, the need for a fully connected data landscape has become an even greater imperative; the potential for deep insights is an opportunity to take business performance to the next level. Quite simply, we need a transformation in the way we handle data. This led to the creation of the OSDU Forum, where a group of like-minded companies came together to create a single, open-source standard for energy data—the OSDU Data Platform. To help build this new standard, SLB has contributed over 200 person-years of engineering development to the OSDU.”—Trygve Randen, director of Data and Digital Subsurface Solutions, SLB.
Operationalizing open-source technology, at scale, with huge volumes of data, is no small feat. It benefits from world-class IT and domain expertise to maximize the potential of this new digital standard. That’s why Microsoft and SLB have connected forces to make the promise of the OSDU Data Platform become real. We are very excited that we have passed a major milestone today, as we bring our complementary solutions to the market and modernize workflows across the energy value chain—including carbon capture and sequestration workflows—to enable digitalization at pace and at scale.
We have also made tremendous progress on our work together around edge technology and IoT with digitally connected oilfields—bringing workers together to improve safety, reliability, and efficiency—all powered by the Microsoft Cloud. In the area of carbon emission management, we are focusing on technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and enabling end-to-end orchestration of data and services to support the CCS value chain on top of Microsoft Cloud.
An open, extensible partner ecosystem
To break data silos and accelerate digital transformation, energy companies will require a strong data management foundation and access to an expansive, global partner ecosystem to accelerate innovation. Azure Data Manager for Energy is an open, developer-ready platform that connects once disparate energy data sets to applications built by Microsoft and our partners. A robust set of software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable integration, innovation, and accelerated time-to-market help developers from around the world build solutions on top of our extensible platform, powered by a scalable, secure cloud. Microsoft is proud to be working with trusted advisors like Accenture, Cegal, EPAM, Infosys, and Wipro to form the foundation of a fully managed OSDU Data Platform to help energy companies migrate to the cloud and drive better decision-making and optimize workflows.
Microsoft is also partnering with industry leaders like AspenTech, Bluware, Halliburton, INT, Katalyst, RoQC, and SLB to build solutions that provide better data management capabilities and higher productivity. By centralizing their data workloads to an open, cloud-based platform fully managed by Microsoft, energy companies have access to more innovation and support. With Azure Data Manager for Energy, customers can seamlessly integrate domain applications from partners into an enterprise-ready cloud-based solution with built-in capabilities for security, scale, monitoring, and operational readiness.
Start transforming your business today
We believe that technology has an important role to play in helping the industry decarbonize, and this work must balance the world’s energy needs and industry practices of today with inventing and deploying solutions for a sustainable future. As the industry works together toward a net zero future, our work with energy evolves, and we continue to be guided by our energy principles and a desire to help drive impact through new technology, innovation, and collaboration.
Azure Data Manager for Energy enables energy companies to gain actionable insights, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate time-to-market on an enterprise-grade, cloud-based OSDU Data Platform. For energy companies and the partner ecosystem that supports them, Azure Data Manager for Energy provides a fully managed and integrated cloud-based data platform that reduces the time, risk, and total costs of ownership associated with energy exploration and production.
Get started with Azure Data Manager for Energy and enable your data to do more on the cloud.
Learn more
- Read about how Equinor targets data efficiency and a low-carbon future with Azure Data Manager for Energy.
- Learn more about themes and actions critical for energy transition.
- Read about how Microsoft and AspenTech are transforming energy customers with the new Azure Data Manager for Energy.
- Read more about how Microsoft partners with energy companies to accelerate digital transformation.
- To learn more about Microsoft for Energy and Resources, visit our future of energy industry solutions website.
1International Energy Outlook 2021, US Energy Information Administration.
