Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Alisa Choong, the chief information officer at Shell, recently told several hundred oil and gas professionals that “digitization is about making the right choices. ” Speaking on a panel at SPE’s Annual Technology Conference and Exhibition in Dallas in September, Choong shared that Shell has made one of those choices by signing a 3-year deal to use the enterprisewide analytics platform developed by Silicon Valley-based C3 IOT on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. The development comes on the heels of BP’s September announcement that is expanding the use of a competing analytics platform. Taken together, these cases reveal how large operating companies plan to manage and put into action their growing arsenals of machine-learning and artificial-intelligence (AI) programs. For the past few years, the industry’s first movers have been assembling data science teams. As these teams and their capabilities mature, it has become clearer that they need a new kind of digital infrastructure that runs independent of the IT department. “That’s fundamentally why Shell decided to standardize on the C3 IOT platform, ” said Ed Abbo, chief technology officer and cofounder of C3 IOT. Seeing his firm’s platform as a “catalyst, ” he added that Shell now has “a jumpstart on the market to operationalize these AI algorithms. ” After raising 100 million in equity funding earlier this year, C3 IOT has become one of the fastest-growing industrial analytics players. Its leadership also includes the billionaire entrepreneur Tom Siebel, who serves as chief executive officer and is most known for selling his previous software company, Siebel Systems, to Oracle for 5. 8 billion in 2005. Abbo was involved in software development at both Siebel Systems and Oracle prior to starting C3 IOT with Siebel. Scaling Up Shell’s AI Shell began its trials with the C3 IOT platform by using it to automatically predict maintenance needs on dozens of gas compressors, which was successful in identifying failure risks up to 48 hours in advance. The plan is now to expand this use case to hundreds of thousands of machines across the world—both on the company’s offshore facilities and onshore refineries. Additionally, Shell’s ambitions include using C3 IOT’s platform to support its supply chain and other digital initiatives involving computer vision and natural-language processing. The ability to scale up this diverse set of applications is seen as the chief driver behind the adoption of enterprise-wide platforms. Founded in 2009, C3 IOT is among the earliest entrants into the platform space and is joined by a growing cast of competitors that include Arundo and GE Predix. These companies are vying for their slice of the upstream market because most oil and gas companies of size store their data in hundreds or thousands of locations. The developers say that without an analytics platform, the job of ingesting, correlating, and keeping all these data sources updated in real time will keep industrial firms from launching algorithms across large bases of equipment and production systems.
Trent Jacobs (Sat,) studied this question.