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IBM and Amazon’s Amazon Web Services announced a partnership on Monday that will see them work together to extend the use of the tools used by oil companies to manage disparate data types.

Amazon in 2018 partnered with Royal Dutch Shell to develop a technology that turns data from more than 100 years of oil production (mostly paper records) into a standardized format for multinational oil companies. The goal- to improve efficiency across all operations.

The technology is being shared across the industry on an open-source basis and only works in cloud computing data centres.

The data residency problem

Some of the biggest oil-producing countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria have no Amazon data centres. Still, they require companies to store their data within the borders of the countries in which they operate.

IBM and Amazon said they had worked together to find a solution for that problem. Using OpenShift (a technology by IBM), oil companies can use the oil industry cloud data tools in privately owned data centres within their countries.

The data residency requirement is about 50% of the modern oil-producing world, according to Manish Chawla, the global managing director for energy, resources, and manufacturing at IBM.

A world in transition

Chawla called that a significant portion of the market. The Veep of engineering at AWS, Bill Vass, said expanding the data tools would help the oil companies add renewable energy assets to their portfolios as we transition to a greener world.

Oil companies know the tide is changing (literally, as oceans rise) and that public sentiments call for a change in how we create and consume energy. The companies realize that they can transition from oil to energy companies, retaining their power as the powers that be in the energy sector, come oil or sunshine.