The era of “easy oil” is coming to an end. The growth of gas exploration – both shale and liquefied natural gas – coupled with the increasing number of unconventional wells, are providing new opportunities and challenges for the industry. Today and going forward, improving the efficiency and productivity of wells will define the success of oil and gas companies.
Among the many assets and benefits critical to the exploration and production processes, data is emerging as one of the most important. The ability to understand and accurately capture production levels at every well in an operation is critical to managing production and correctly forecasting results. Oil and gas companies that collect and manage data have been able to improve automation in the oilfield, gain process efficiency, identify the skills gap that is emerging in the work force, and make more informed business decisions.
These opportunities and challenges are pushing energy enterprises to transform how they use IT. Oil and gas CIOs are realizing the benefits of a more agile IT infrastructure that can rapidly deliver new applications and services, streamline automation strategies to increase production, and connect oilfield operations with backend IT systems.
Converged infrastructure can help expedite the development of enterprise applications and services by increasing operational efficiency and improving production predictability, while maintaining current IT spend levels. It has become a catalyst for consolidating siloed organizations, freeing up critical IT resources to work on higher-value projects and new application deployments.
VCE converged infrastructure – Vblock Systems – transition oil and gas companies’ IT infrastructure deployment and operations to a simple, standardized, service-based approach. Adopters have validated Vblock Systems by constructing the next generation of cloud-based and software-defined data centers on the highly reliable platforms. VCE architects and engineers have helped oil and gas customers successfully achieve:
- Standardized infrastructure platforms with a predictable performance envelope for oilfield and mobility application deployments. This has enabled organizations to centralize operations and remotely manage Vblock Systems with a highly optimized staff.
- Data center consolidations to gain efficiencies and speed up integrations from merger and acquisition activity, capturing the cost benefits from consolidation.
- Deployment of highly secure infrastructure as a service capabilities for application development projects and delivery of popular ISV applications in a software as a service (SaaS) delivery model.
As a validated infrastructure for SAP environments, VCE is also working with oil and gas customers to architect solutions that use Vblock Systems as highly reliable, scalable platforms for their next-generation SAP applications and databases. A recently published impact assessment by Forrester Research describes the value that customers have identified utilizing Vblock Systems for SAP deployments.
All journeys begin with a first step. VCE leads the way for oil and gas enterprises, such as Iqon/Rompetrol and Plains Midstream, as they begin their transformation to a more agile, data-driven enterprise.
