Two years ago, through demand generated within its business teams, multinational oil and gas supermajor bp recognized AI as one of its top strategic priorities. The operating model developed to accelerate this initiative is called ai@bp and comprises a core team that looks holistically at the opportunities the technology presents across the business groups.

bp’s AI strategy is targeting business value and has the potential to impact and increase efficiencies in every aspect of its business where there’s a profit center, from allocation of capital, to its enormous and complex supply chain which includes satellites and vessels for sea, highway, and rail transport, to predictive maintenance of assets, to peak optimization of wind turbines, to seismic interpretation of subsurface for hydrocarbon exploration and production that itself produces petabytes of data.

Also, importantly, analytics and AI will unlock value for marketing and in integrated supply and trading, bp’s energy trading arm, and the orchestration engine of the business that looks to enhance performance, manage risk, ensure compliance, and maximize value throughout the entire company.”

The right partner for measurable results

bp selected Cloudreach to help it achieve the goal of global optimization. “Cloudreach is widely recognized as a strategic partner for cloud engineering,” said Kimberly Anderson, Service Owner for Technology Incubation at bp. “With the type of scale and complexity we’re talking about, we needed a strong track record and some serious expertise in cloud engineering.”

bp’s AI strategy has three pillars: activate, accelerate, and advance. “Activate is around what our AI-enablement team is doing at the moment,” said Lance Goodship, Principal Architect for AI at bp, “building a foundation for the active adoption of AI across bp and a solid platform to get to the next stage. Accelerate is really all about rapidly scaling where we see innovation opportunities that add value. And in the advance phase, we will be taking products to a high degree of maturity by fully exploiting the capabilities of AI.”

Moving towards solutions at pace

For bp and its many other customers, Cloudreach is engineering Microsoft Azure analytics and AI solutions to help them leverage their data, become more efficient, and achieve strong outcomes for their business, including creating new lines of business.

Cloudreach deployed and configured a range of specialized Microsoft Azure services and features in bp’s upstream digital factory. “The spectrum of business challenges is enormous,” said Goodship. “We’ve found that practically every mature aspect of AI and machine learning, as well as every emerging one, has relevance in one of these applications across bp.”

With Cloudreach’s cloud engineering expertise, bp solved complex enablement challenges and was ready to implement Microsoft Azure AI and machine learning in just six weeks. “We’re building out automation patterns and accelerator templates,” said Anderson. “We’re implementing best practices and helping our data sciences community improve time to value.” bp, Cloudreach, and Microsoft are also working together to evaluate several Microsoft Azure services that are in private preview, enabling them in bp's environment to validate potential use cases.

Use cases the team has enabled include:

• Using Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer to extract data into a machine-readable format and developing an accelerator for bulk extraction for a region with a potential value realization of $20M+ USD.
• Creating a reusable pattern for automating the scaling and testing process allowing for unsupervised testing, which has the potential to reduce time to analyze a well from three months down to less than one week.
• Moving a solution from local desktop to Microsoft Azure, resulting in a reusable, scalable, and highly available solution with cost savings of over $2M USD.
• Currently evaluating Microsoft Azure Anomaly Detection and Microsoft Azure Project Bonsai (machine teaching), and how these services can provide value to the business.

Helping customers get ahead

Cloudreach is the leading global cloud-native solutions provider with a broad set of transformation capabilities that enable end-to-end cloud adoption at scale—even for the largest and most complex organizations, like bp.

Over the past decade, Cloudreach has helped many enterprises make their cloud transformation and modernization journey. The company’s breadth and depth of capabilities range from strategy, operating models, and scaled migrations, to data and machine learning, to application modernization and managed services. “Everything is going to be about data and AI in the future,” said Andre Azevedo, SVP and General Manager, Microsoft Azure at Cloudreach. “Analytics and AI will be built into every single app and every process. What bp is doing today is an excellent example of how to prepare for the future by using data to be more efficient, to generate new lines of business, and to deliver very strong outcomes for your business.”

As a cloud-native company, Cloudreach has extensive experience helping customers change operational modes and adapt to new working environments as well as execute with deep technical capabilities.

The transformative power of Microsoft Azure

Following five years of Microsoft Azure partnership, Cloudreach created a dedicated Microsoft practice in 2019 to help enterprises advance and accelerate their Microsoft cloud migrations, data and AI, and cloud-native application modernization. Cloudreach is a Microsoft partner with 13 Gold Competencies and a Microsoft Azure Expert MSP partner with hundreds of Microsoft Azure experts helping customers leverage the power of Microsoft Azure.

The company’s capabilities and services have grown with the cloud and now encompass the powerful analytics and AI that Microsoft Azure enables. The support and engagement that Cloudreach has with Microsoft is central to it delivering innovative features to customers.

Cloudreach’s meaningful and impactful work for bp on the Microsoft Azure platform is also being leveraged and amplified in engagements for customers across multiple industries. For example:.

For a UK-based multinational consumer goods company, Cloudreach built a cloud transformation program enabling increased flexibility and significant cost savings.

A global insurance services company unleashed innovative support for its customers worldwide through foundational strategy provided by Cloudreach. A mass data migration process is currently underway.

“As a cloud-native partner, Cloudreach has exceptional insight into Microsoft’s industry-leading platform,” said Simran Sachar, Analytics & AI Director, Microsoft One Commercial Partner. “Their engagement with bp is a shining example of the important, game-changing work we are doing together for our customers.”

The future is data and AI

Cloudreach sees a bright future in partnership with Microsoft to build out complex platforms that deliver unmatched ease of use to customers’ data scientists and exceptional value to even the largest organizations. “We've helped a lot of organizations on their cloud transformation journey,” said Jack Powell, Cloud Systems Engineer at Cloudreach. “We’ve seen the remarkable modernization that happens during that journey. The logical next step is building in the data and AI capabilities, including machine learning and cognitive services, that Microsoft Azure provides.”

Continuing to expand and apply “the power of three”—Cloudreach plus Microsoft plus a highly-motivated customer like bp—the company will empower organizations with high-capability, high-performance solutions to optimize their data, providing seamless and transparent compliance in respect of infrastructure, computing security, access controls, and data sovereignty. “The cloud gives you the infinite capacity to store data at a very low price point and the ability to analyze the data in real-time on an ongoing basis,” said Azevedo. “This is what the future looks like.”

All of Cloudreach’s customers benefit from landmark engagements like the one with bp: Learnings, best practices, and automation of previous solutions are assiduously applied to achieve further innovation and deliver value for each and every Cloudreach customer.