The oil and gas industry is poised for steady growth towards digitization with ER&D spend across the space being USD 50.2 billion and expected to grow steadily at 3.5% every year till 2021. Most of the hubs are in North America indicating that the decision making is still governed by the US. Top Oil and Gas giants have set up their R&D centres in Houston, Texas a global hub for building oilfield equipment. Bangalore and Bay Area are emerging hotspots for companies to setup digital COE recognizing the pool of digital talents in these regions.
Tech Giants, Start-ups, and Service Providers are at the forefront of building digital-first solutions to the industry. Tech giants are exploring newer use cases in cognitive computing and AI with heavy investments in cloud and analytics platforms to develop software-based use cases. Analytics, IoT and Clean energy are major focus areas gaining investments among start-ups. Service Providers are building in-house platforms or partnering with technology companies to develop IoT platforms. Service Providers can provide capability in emerging areas such as ML, AI, and IoT.
Companies like Microsoft and IBM have built advanced analytics and AI toolsets into their cloud products to develop digital use cases across the value chain. They are working closely with OEMs & startups to build domain-specific use cases such as Equipment health monitoring, Cognitive exploration, seismic imaging and surveying, Field productivity, production asset optimization and predictive maintenance are top use cases built around cloud-based platforms.
