Microsoft, Halliburton to partner for digital modernization of oil and gas industry

Digital powerhouse Microsoft and exploration and production giant Halliburton announced a new
partnership this week, intended to join two unique skill sets into transformation of the oil and gas industry.

The alliance means to capitalize on each company’s skillsets: the cloud and digital transformation
capabilities of Microsoft and the exploration and production science, software and services of Halliburton.
To that end, Halliburton has made its DecisionSpace 365 service available on Microsoft’s cloud computing Azure program, allowing for real-time data streaming between physical devices in oilfields and the network.

“Halliburton is focused on delivering intelligent cloud solutions to drive the next generation of efficient oil and gas exploration and production,” Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, said. “We are excited to bring the power of Azure’s hyperscale, hybrid and global cloud platform technologies to this alliance to enhance the value chain for our mutual customers.”

The move with Azure will allow for optimization of drilling and production, which they hope will lower costs for customers. Azure will handle heavy computing for the production efforts, relying on predictive deep-learning algorithms to help optimize assets in the field, while enabling further exploration. The companies hope it will reduce both time involved and fill in gaps in data collection.

“Halliburton is at the forefront of the digital transformation occurring in the E&P industry,” Nagaraj Srinivasan, senior vice president of Landmark and Halliburton Digital Solutions, said. “We believe open architecture and community-based innovation are necessary to drive this fundamental change and we’re proud to work closely with an industry leader like Microsoft to deliver tailored E&P digital business solutions to our customers across the globe.”

This is just the beginning, though. The companies hope to collaborate on applying deep learning to reservoir characterization, modeling and simulation, building domain-specific visualization for mixed reality, creating interactive applications and by digitalizing E&P assets. They seek to have fully digital representations of physical assets available on Microsoft’s HoloLens and Surface devices.