Energy companies face two defining challenges:
- Surviving a period of unprecedented market volatility and low prices accelerated by the global impact of COVID-19
- Navigating the opportunity of transitioning toward the low-carbon energy future
The energy industry’s success depends on its unlocking the enormous digital opportunity offered by data that is searchable, discoverable and consumable. This data has the potential to enable innovation at scale globally. However, the degree of technological sophistication required to manage existing energy systems — and power an increasing variety of new and evolving energy sources — demands a seamless infrastructure to unleash digital transformation across workflows, disciplines and operational boundaries.
Developing an architecture to accelerate innovation through open source
In order to tackle the deep-seated and longstanding data challenges facing the energy industry, The Open Group OSDUTM Forum focused on data management and governance, industry standards and driving interoperability across interpretation and analysis tools. In practice, this meant unlocking data from proprietary models, software, and applications. The resulting data and application architectures are flexible enough to allow the addition of new data types and ingestion mechanisms without the need to rewrite the whole codebase. Therefore, the system is flexible enough to allow this level of freedom and adaptability when including new data types and supporting new energy models.
The OSDU Forum’s first production release, the Mercury Release, will be available from March 24 to the entire oil and gas industry and surrounding ecosystem. The OSDU data foundation is an architectural design enabling a unified scalable data foundation, accessible through a set of standard APIs, based on industry data standards leveraging the full spectrum of subsurface data types and wells.
The Open Group Forum, now supported by 200 members, has outlined the much-anticipated integration of production, sensor and facilities data targeted for 1H 2021. Additionally, the roadmap outlines Edge support with a focus on real-time workflows and a future enabling LNG and new energy developments.
IBM Open Data for Industries – The right choice to power the OSDU data foundation
The Mercury Release data foundation can be enabled through an OSDU data platform provider.
IBM Open Data for Industries for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data delivers the only end-to-end open source, enterprise-grade platform supporting the OSDU data foundation. It enables infrastructure-agnostic, cloud-agnostic and vendor-neutral solutions to be installed anywhere, including on-premises behind the firewall or on any cloud from any provider.
By leveraging IBM hybrid cloud technology, built on the Red Hat® OpenShift® container platform, IBM Open Data for Industries empowers developers, users (geoscientists and engineers) and data scientists to work effectively across subsurface data to deploy software and technologies that help them model and visualize quickly and at scale.
IBM Open Data for Industries is also fully integrated with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, enabling the energy industry to drive trusted data and AI insights across their workflows. This means the industry can benefit from seamless automation, data mining and analysis, and development of cloud applications and multicloud management directly within the IBM platform — without having to reinvent their entire IT infrastructure. With data virtualization, enterprises can connect data sources from inside and outside OSDU into a single self-balancing collection of data sources or databases, using the processing power of every data source and accessing what each one has physically stored, avoiding latency from moving and copying data. In addition, all repository data is accessible in real time, and governance and erroneous data issues are virtually eliminated. Deployable across any cloud or on premises, IBM Cloud Pak for Data delivers cutting-edge solutions to meet the demanding workflows of the energy industry.
Cloud independence: Full control over your cloud journey
The OSDU Data Foundation helps prepare the energy industry to leverage cloud technology including the advantages of scalability and agility. Cloud technologies help unleash data and create new opportunities, and a hybrid cloud strategy is often the optimal path — delivering both efficiency and cost effectiveness for maximized flexibility and control over your infrastructure. Businesses can realize a 2.5X value with a hybrid cloud platform approach.
To meet the diverse operational and regulatory requirements of the energy industry, data sovereignty and security compliance, in-country cloud and cybersecurity are all essential. By choosing IBM Open Data for Industries, you can gain strategic control over your cloud journey and your infrastructure, providing the greatest flexibility to meet the unique needs of the upstream industry including on-premises hardware and behind-the-firewall security.
IBM is committed to open source technologies and to the Open Group OSDU Forum. Supporting collaboration across the energy industry and surrounding ecosystem will enable flexibility in the ongoing transition to new energies for a sustainable future.
Download our whitepaper to learn more about the OSDU Data Foundation
Register to attend our upcoming virtual event.
Sign up for IBM Open for Industries for IBM Cloud Pak for Data.
Book a meeting for an expert consultation.
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