How IT Impacts the Energy Industry

by Magnus Källkvist, Territory Manager Norway, SUSE

Since the 70s Oil and gas industry is a backbone for Norwegian economy. I’m just back from Stavanger where SUSE participated in the annual Computerworld event for energy companies Energyworld – IT in Oil & Gas . Talking to a lot of IT Managers there, main topic in our discussions was how energy companies can drive real value from the investment in their IT environment.

Enterprises in the utilities, oil and gas industries have to deal with a lot of changes caused by falling gas and oil prices, the rise of renewable sources of energy, the demise of the nuclear industry, deregulation and digitization. Our energy industry is making great strides in how energy sources are extracted, created and used – always with the aim of using less to do more.

Information technology (IT) has rarely been mentioned here, yet technology and innovation plays a critical role in the energy industry. Advances in IT can produce huge impact in reducing energy usage, providing more reliable energy delivery and improving our standard of living with new applications. However, realizing the promise of IT to shape the world’s energy future will require significant innovation, not just the application of existing IT knowledge. Today the IT environment is the life blood of your business and as an IT organization you are under constant pressure to provide continual access and meet growing demand.

SUSE can help with optimizing and modernizing the data center and make it ready to partake from further innovation. Our SUSE solutions get our customer’s IT-infrastructure on track towards Zero Downtime as they are built for mission-critical use and minimal downtime, helping enterprises to run their business productively round-the-clock and maximizing uptime.

Standardizing a Unix data center for example on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platform is one important part of modernizing the IT environment. “We had to be faster to provide solutions to our business in less time,” said the IT director of a global energy provider. “Standardization allowed us to reduce this time. Shrinking the time to market is the main goal that we have achieved.” This quote from Forester study on The Total Economic Impact (TEI) of SUSE Linux Enterprise shows how a global energy company based in Europe was able to benefit from reduced CAPEX costs, maintenance fees costs and increased responsiveness of the business migrating from Unix to Linux.

In his session at Energyworld – IT in Oil and Gas “Managing the parallels – Driving ruthless efficiency and enabling agility through Open Source Technology” Vinay Ramananda, Solution Head for Infrastructure services at Wipro Technologies Europe (WIPRO) explained the importance of embracing open standards for cloud and automation, and how Wipro and SUSE can help energy industry customers to stay relevant by driving competitive technology into their business.

Read more about what SUSE can do for customers in the Energy Industry.