British oil and gas supermajor BP will shut down its European data centres and migrate 900+ applications running on-premises onto AWS, the company said today, deepening its existing relationship with the cloud provider.
As part of that move BP will also create a major new data lake on Amazon S3 and speed up migration of its SAP applications to AWS, the company said today, as it seeks to drive efficiencies across its sprawling global estate amid slumping earnings. (BP already has over 30 of its 65 SAP applications running on AWS).
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a separate announcement late Wednesday however, BP said it will be providing AWS with over 170MW of wind and solar capacity in Sweden and Spain annually as part of a 10-year deal to supply Amazon’s fulfillment network in Europe and AWS data centers.
AWS and BP
Oil and gas companies are lucrative targets for the cloud hyperscalers with their colossal range of operations across the upstream (seismic data, exploration and production operations) processing/transportation midstream and marketing/distribution downstream and rich datasets.
See also: HSBC Building Artificial Intelligence Utility: Has 10PB Data, Needs AI Help
The companies dubbed it an “all-in” move and in Europe it is. In the US, where a migration is already underway, the company also runs a number of upstream applications on Microsoft Azure.
As part of the new deal BP will start using Amazon Kinesis, a service that to analyse real-time streaming data across operations including gas station pump operations, running machine learning operations on that data using SageMaker to “make faster business decisions and drive efficiencies” the energy giant said.
BP (which saw earnings plunge by 41 percent in the third quarter) has 73,000 employees active in over 78 countries. It continues to run its own compute for exploration and production data analysis out of a HPC centre in Houston, where it has an HPE and Intel-backed nine petaflop system with 1,140 terabytes (1.14 petabytes) of memory and 30 petabytes of storage.
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Read our interview on the migration here > “You’ve Got to Have Courage!” BP on Going “All-In” on the Cloud
BP CIO Steve Fortune said: “Exiting our European data centers and migrating to AWS supports our digital transformation agenda, and we’re excited about the possibilities for increased flexibility, operational efficiencies, and opportunities to innovate while helping to advance the energy transition.”
The agreement is the latest in a string of notable new contracts announced by AWS at its Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Others include pharmaceutical firm Novartis (for which AWS will start providing a range of IoT services to boost supply chain effiency), a new tie-up with entertainment company FOX Corporation, deals with US-based healthcare services business Cerner and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)’s CAT subsidiary, an audit provider, and US consultancy Slalom.
Read this: Anadarko Migrates E&P Models to Google Cloud, Eyes Real Time Drilling Insight
