Phillips 66 reduces costs and increases agility with SUSE

“What we have done is not just a digital transformation, it’s a business transformation.” Shawn Behounek General Manager, Digital Strategy, Architecture and Analytics Phillips 66.

How does one of the largest oil producers in the world mitigate a global pandemic that completely wipes out global demand? That was precisely the situation American oil giant Phillips 66 was faced with when Coronavirus first emerged in late 2019.

For the first time in history, crude oil prices fell below zero, throwing this often volatile market into a new level of uncertainty. Oil production facilities, unable to cease operations, were filling up storage tanks faster than expected demand, forcing them to pay buyers to take oil off their hands.

The infrastructure team at Phillips 66 knew that being a more efficient and agile organization would help them to successfully navigate this volatility. Working with SUSE, Phillips 66 has transformed its technical architecture – putting open source technology at the heart of its growth and resilience strategy.

Driving business agility and savings through digital transformation

The AdvantEdge66 digital transformation program was designed by Phillips 66 to make the company more competitive and to drive significant savings – $1.3 billion – through the reallocation of IT expenditure to modern, transformative technologies such as SAP S/4HANA. More importantly, the focus was to invest in technologies that would help Phillips 66 mitigate and respond to market changes more quickly, without disruption. In 2016, Phillips 66 selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications to achieve these goals and started the transition to the cloud in late 2018.

Migrating a Global Fortune 500 company from on-premises hardware to the cloud, including large SAP S/4HANA workloads, was a huge undertaking. Working with SUSE, in successful collaboration with SAP, Intel and AWS, the AdvantEdge66 program has transformed networking and collaboration tools. The impact has been significant. Phillips 66 is now able to run systems at scale with remotely positioned support personnel. It is also better able to respond quickly and adapt to current market conditions with minimal disruption to the business.

Click here to find out more about how Phillips 66 is working with SUSE to drive agility and achieve serious efficiencies.