OREANDA-NEWS. August 23, 2017. Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Halliburton (NYSE: HAL) today announced plans to enter into a strategic alliance to drive digital transformation across the oil and gas industry. The relationship will combine the expertise of a global leader in cloud and digital transformation with a global leader in exploration and production (E&P) science, software and services.

"Halliburton is focused on delivering intelligent cloud solutions to drive the next generation of efficient oil and gas exploration and production," said Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure. "We are excited to bring the power of Azure’s hyperscale, hybrid and global cloud platform technologies to this alliance to enhance the value chain for our mutual customers."

Researchers and engineers from both companies will leverage and optimize Microsoft technologies in machine learning, augmented reality (AR), user interactions and Industrial Internet of Things, as well as Azure's high-performant infrastructure and built-in computing capabilities to deliver tightly integrated solutions across the energy value chain. Areas of collaboration include: applying deep learning to reservoir characterization, modeling and simulation, building domain-specific visualization for mixed reality, creating highly interactive applications and fueling the digitalization of E&P assets.

As a first step in the alliance, Halliburton has made DecisionSpace® 365 available on Azure, enabling real-time data streaming from IoT edge devices in oilfields and the ability to apply deep-learning models to optimize drilling and production to lower costs for customers. With the power of DecisionSpace® on Azure, big compute and predictive deep-learning algorithms will help optimize field assets and enable next-generation exploration and deep-earth models by using software to fill gaps in sensor data, while reducing the number of steps and time required to render models.

"Halliburton is at the forefront of the digital transformation occurring in the E&P industry," said Nagaraj Srinivasan, senior vice president of Landmark and Halliburton Digital Solutions. "We believe open architecture and community-based innovation are necessary to drive this fundamental change and we’re proud to work closely with an industry leader like Microsoft to deliver tailored E&P digital business solutions to our customers across the globe."

The breadth and depth of this collaboration will allow the companies to apply voice and image recognition, video processing and AR/Virtual Reality to create a digital representation of a physical asset using Microsoft’s HoloLens and Surface devices. Additionally, the companies will utilize digital representation for oil wells and pumps at the IoT edge using the Landmark Field Appliance and Azure Stack.

Microsoft Azure will also become Halliburton’s preferred public cloud provider for iEnergy®, the oil and gas industry’s first global E&P cloud linking the oilfield to the office.