Stephen Nellis and Liz Hampton

(Reuters) – International Business Machines Corp and Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services announced on Monday their cooperation to increase the use of a range of tools oil companies have for managing different data types.

Amazon and Royal Dutch Shell collaborated with LON: to invent a technology for turning data from over 100 years of oil production into standardised format that can be used by multinational oil companies. This will allow them to enhance their efficiency.

Open-source technology sharing the technology industry-wide is possible. It only works with cloud computing data centers. Some oil-producing countries, like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria have no Amazon data centres but they require that companies store data inside their borders.

IBM Amazon and IBM both stated that they had worked together in solving the problem. OpenShift technology from IBM allows oil companies access to the cloud data tools of the oil-industry in their private data centers.

Manish Chawla (global managing director, energy, resources, and manufacturing, IBM) said that data residency is almost half of all oil-producing countries today. This is an important part of the market.

Bill Vass is AWS’ vice president for engineering. He said that expanding access to the data tools will also allow oil companies to add non-petroleum assets like wind and solar into their portfolios. Producing renewable energy means that producers must know where their output is at all times.

Vass explained that as they move to energy companies it will make their transition easier because all of their data (wind data, solar data, transmission data) is there.

“Until you look at the different methods of transmitting energy, it’s hard to imagine how complex the energy grid is.”