Chevron is one of the largest energy companies in the world. And it has just signed a major agreement to digitize its oil field on Microsoft's Azure public cloud platform. While the details of this agreement are not public, it is widely to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. This is the big league!
If you are in the energy sector, what does this mean for you? If you still manage your own data centers and hardware, how long can you continue to do so before it hurts your business? The "cloud is not ready for me" argument is getting more tenous by the day. Cloud can handle your workload. Don't believe it? Conside this: just one seismic energy operation in Chevron's workflow produces 100 terabytes of data. That's from one operation. And here's what Chevron's CIO said about cloud:
"Until the last couple years, we didn’t think the cloud was ready for business at Chevron’s scale,” Braun says. “In the last couple years, that started to turn. The cloud is starting to come of age.”
This feels like an inflection point in the evolution of enterprise cloud. It is worth remembering that not long ago, Microsoft's cloud email service was seen as unsuitable for large corporations. CIOs and Exchange administrators raised concerns and resisted. That all went away when Microsoft started signing up companies such as Lowes to move their email to the cloud. Suddenly the CIO who still wanted to run his own exchange server looked woefully out of touch. Fast forward to today and Microsoft's cloud email Office365 serves over 120 million business users. All the security and latency concerns have been addressed and its business as usual.
This is just the tip of the spear when it comes to cloud adoption. More applications and verticals will follow. Enterprise Resource Planning, High Performance Computing, Analytics - everyone wants the benefit of not doing IT the old way.
All of this news comes on the heels of a new report that Microsoft Azure is now growing twice as fast as AWS. AWS is still the larger business, but this increase in pace from Microsoft indicates that the famed Enterprise Sales machine has sprung into gear. Being a part of this vibrant ecosystem is exciting!