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Solutions in Oil & Gas By HP
By Kamal Husain, Regional Business Development Manager, Oil & Gas Industry
HP is a major supplier of IT infrastructure and services to the oil and gas industry. Chevron Texaco, Shell, BP, Statoil, Surgutneft, SASOL, Slovnaft, PKN Orlen, MOL, Petro Ofisi, Qatar Petroleum, ADMA-OPCO, ADCO, ADGAS, Dolphin Energy, Ras Laffan Gas and ENOC are examples of some of the global and regional oil companies, which depend on HP for their enterprise computing needs.
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Satisfying the global demands of the oil & Gas industry
Companies working in oil, gas, and related products require exemplary performance, extremely reliable data and technology systems that can readily handle massive amounts of information that the industry generates. These systems must be flexible enough to work with disparate applications, support remote locations, and integrate newly acquired companies. HP's vision for an agile and adaptive enterprise delivers on the need for oil and gas companies to create a standardized, seamless and dynamic IT infrastructure that can adapt as customer and business needs evolve.
Some of the industry’s key business drivers which form the basis of HP’s systems and solutions planning for the oil and gas industry are:
• The industry’s desire to increase the efficiency of finding and producing hydrocarbons.
• The need to maximize utilization of capital and human assets and increase procurement efficiency especially in the asset intensive upstream business.
• To increase refinery margins and operational flexibility.
• The desire to significantly increase fuel retail margins and increase market share.
• The requirement to comply with ever increasing standards for health, safety and environment.
HP spent a considerable amount of time prioritizing its offerings based on the business drivers and together with key industry application partners is in a strong position to offer a number of solutions for the industry.
Infrastructure Solutions
These comprise a number of hardware, firmware, software and service components to enable the implementation of a number of corporate and IT strategies.
High Performance Computing for Exploration and Production
One of the key HP initiatives has been in the area of Open Systems High Performance Technical Computing. The success of the 64 bit Itanium 2 chip by INTEL and now the growing acceptance of Clusters based on AMD Opteron coupled with the availability of software to manage large scale parallel processing clusters, such as LINUX, have opened new doors for the oil and gas industry to realize significant cost savings while increasing application performance.
HP has been a close collaboration partner of INTEL in the development of the Itanium chipset and is a leading supplier of Itanium 2 based servers and workstations. HP is now also beginning to enjoy increasing success with its AMD based clusters and workstations as well.
Over the last couple of years HP has also entered the specialized technical arena for high volume and high speed parallel file access technology for large hydrocarbon data sets and the need to access the data with minimum latency by dozen’s of petroleum and geology engineers. HP has made significant strides in this respect and together with its technology partners is now actively demonstrating this technology.
Similarly, advances have been made in open and high end visualization systems which threaten to bring the cost of doing such visualization down by a factor of 5-10 times on cost performance basis when compared to existing legacy systems.
IT Consolidation
Limited resources leave little room for error, and the ability to react immediately and confidently is the key to success. What is needed is an adaptive enterprise with a flexible IT infrastructure that can make the enterprise more agile and flexible.
One way to build an infrastructure for an adaptive enterprise is through IT consolidation, which optimizes people, processes, and systems to be more efficient and effective. HP has the experience to help architect, integrate, manage a company’s IT infrastructure to eliminate redundancy, streamline applications and databases, provide increased agility, and optimize the IT environment for the superior performance and ROA. The result is a more powerful, agile platform that ensures continuous and secure operations, and lower cost of managing change.
High Availability
In today's competitive business world the IT infrastructure's availability, stability, and adaptability are the keys to success. Any type of disruption to the infrastructure could have a wide ranging impact. Yet, it has become increasingly difficult for IT organizations focused on running the day-to-day business, to have the resources to continually research and master the latest advances in technology, as well as find the skilled staff to keep up with their operational requirements.
Finding the right balance of technology, sound IT management practices, and well-planned proactive, preventive and reactive services are the basis to high availability. HP can design, implement, and manage high availability solutions that can help meet business critical needs.
Business Solutions
This set of solutions derive their directions directly from the core business of the industry and HP works very closely with independent software vendors, integration partners and industry consultants to customize and deploy these offerings.
HP’s Digital Oil Field solution
For oil and gas companies focused on exploration, acquisition and development of oil field resources, HP provides a secure IT infrastructure that integrates all devices, information and partners to provide a single view of the field. HP upstream solutions – developed together with our customers and partners – revolve around the digital oilfield concept, where smart, quick decisions can be made based on real-time information about oil field assets.
This solution can help companies shorten time to production, increase efficiency and uptime, and lower costs in the fields. In summary this joint initiative with Microsoft and Intel, provides cost-effective and secure middleware platform to enable real-time decision support and closed loop processing in the field.
Fuel Station Retail Automation
HP solution for downstream marketing and sales are geared to oil companies focused on fuel station retail and integration. These solutions help companies leverage the excellent full service retail potential of their station network. The solution is composed of a number of embedded mini-solutions for addressing the varied concerns of oil retail companies. For example, these solutions help the chains meet new regulatory compliance, reduce operating costs, decrease fraud, introduce innovative loyalty programs, implement customer relationship best practices, launch convenience store operations and help in planning and launching new and innovative services.
Additional offerings such as Remote Print Management (RPM), RFID technology deployment and SAP IS-Oil modules implementation and integration are the other aspects of the solution services. RPM is a unique HP solution which draws heavily on HP’s expertise in imaging and printing and enables the fuel chains to launch and deploy marketing program brochures and catalogues at a significantly lower cost and with greater flexibility than ever before. HP is a leader in RFID technology and one of the first uses to which this technology is being deployed in oil and gas downstream is for lube oil asset inventory control and sales.
The HP intelligent fuel station portfolio also enhances wet and dry stock supply chain planning by integrating both front and back office retail systems. The solution business discovery workshop provides the first stage – identifying new opportunities, cost savings, automation potential and services for fleet customers and consumers.
The workshop enables the companies to define and refine the vision for a fully optimized supply chain and develop clear strategic roadmap for successful implementation.
Fuel retail chains can benefit from the workshop findings by implementing strategies for back-office integration, marketing services redesign and general business transformation in the changing competitive marketplace.
In addition to these business solutions, HP is already at an advanced stage of finalizing a solution for Refinery Intelligence Systems working very closely with a world wide leader for such technologies. Details of this new offering will be forthcoming over the next couple of months.
In summary, HP strives to stand out as a serious partner to the oil and gas industry both as a technology leader as well as an integrated business solutions provider by working in close harmony with the leading application vendors to the industry
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