news Oil and gas exploration and production firm INPEX has announced the signing of a new application management deal with IBM in Australia.
Aimed at reducing costs and improving operational efficiency, the five-year deal will see the Big Blue manage a range of apps across areas such as human resources, finance, production planning, production accounting and revenue.
The applications developed and managed by IBM will also “lay the foundation for the future use of analytics to further improve efficiency”, the IT giant said in a statement.
The agreement will also make IBM one of the oil and gas company’s largest IT service contractors in Australia, it added.
This deal follows a previous four-year operations application delivery (OAD) project between the two firms under which IBM was contracted to develop and integrate over 40 apps supporting liquified natural gas (LNG) operations.
Under the new agreement, IBM will also be managing apps it delivered in the previous OAD project, as well as those from other vendors.
The deal, which the statement said was “driven by market pressure on oil commodity prices to protect capital investment”, is aimed to reduce IT support costs while at the same time delivering greater levels of service and efficiency.
The cost savings will be realised through the enhanced global delivery of IT services and automation, the firm added
“Oil prices and the need to drive efficiency in the oil and gas business are no secret to the industry and many organisations are looking to find ways to do this but at the same time also trim costs,” said Andrew Johnstone-Burt, Managing Partner Global Business Services, IBM.
“IBM’s heritage in oil and gas, proven reliable delivery, intelligent technologies and customer-centric approach combined with our specialist teams at our LNG Centre of Excellence in Perth meant we had the local skills to offer dedicated expertise,” Johnstone-Burt said.
“This team [is] supported by an ecosystem of global IBM industry experts that enabled IBM to offer an end-to-end solution meeting specific operational needs,” he concluded.
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