Chevron Corporation has announced a 7-year partnership with Microsoft Corp., establishing the company as Chevron’s primary cloud provider, accelerating the application of advanced technologies including analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) to drive performance and improve efficiencies.

“We embrace every opportunity that streamlines our workflows, gives us insights into more efficient operations and helps us compete,” says Joe Geagea, Chevron’s executive vice president of Technology, Projects and Services. “We already have a head start in digitizing our oilfields, but we want to accelerate our deployment of new technologies that position us to increase our revenues, lower our costs, and improve the safety and reliability of our operations.”

The Microsoft strategic partnership is part of Chevron’s overall digitization initiative, a multi-year effort to streamline information technology (IT) operations around a digital core connecting the company’s engineers and operations through nimble analytics and increased automation. Adoption of Microsoft’s Azure platform will allow Chevron’s IT workforce to evolve from supporting infrastructure to one that enables more advanced technologies, as well as optimize exploration, reservoir management, production operations, midstream logistics and marketing operations.

“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 hyper-scale is something we intend to leverage for agility and efficiency. Through this strategic partnership, we believe Chevron will have a competitive advantage,” says Bill Braun, Chief Information Officer. “The volumes and velocity of real time data we obtain from the reservoir through refineries to the retail pump grows at a dramatic pace every year. Our Microsoft relationship will advance our high-performance computing, IoT, and help capitalize on innovation in data science and machine learning.”

The strategic partnership also extends to broader technical collaboration that will allow the two companies to focus on joint innovation from a technology and business process perspective. This will include identifying areas to influence Microsoft’s roadmap of future products and where Microsoft solutions can help solve Chevron’s business challenges.

“With Chevron and Microsoft, intelligent energy meets intelligent cloud,” says 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.”

Tags: Chevron Corporation, Microsoft Corp.