This post was co-authored by Sacha Abinader, Managing Director, Accenture and Keith Armstron, Senior Manager, Accenture Microsoft Business Group.
Accelerate decision-making and interoperability with the OSDU Data Platform
The OSDU™ Forum is a cross-industry collaboration to develop a common, standards-based, and open platform for the exploration and production (E&P) community with the goal to liberate and enable greater access and insight into your valuable data. The OSDU Data Platform promise is compelling and offers value beyond what can be achieved with in-house solutions through established industry standards and openness to the larger technology ecosystem. Accenture has partnered with Microsoft and collaborated closely with Schlumberger during the Microsoft Energy Data Services preview and development process. In addition to Accenture’s domain expertise and digital integration acumen, the preview experience has allowed Accenture to develop skills and scale a team specific to this offering to enable an operator’s OSDU Data Platform journey at pace.
As such, the OSDU Data Platform as an industry solution has been a top priority for Accenture with significant investments in skills, people, assets, and our presence and leadership as part of the OSDU Forum.
“We are thrilled to be a services partner for Microsoft Energy Data Services. The partnership with Microsoft and Schlumberger in enabling an open platform has been wonderful. As part of preview, Accenture has been driving for interoperability across the technology ecosystem to bridge siloed teams and has partnered with Schlumberger and several ISVs to make this a reality. We are excited to enable operators to create additional value through improved and accelerated decision making and the development of new workflows and analytics.”—Emma Wild, Managing Director, Global OSDU Lead.
Accenture has been actively involved in the OSDU Data Platform initiative for several years. In addition to our commitment to the OSDU Forum, we have developed our own vision and strategy as to how we can support OSDU Data Platform integration into E&P workflows and how we can increase operators’ business capability and data value.
Accenture understands our clients’ challenges and is their partner for complex transformations
Our partners and clients want access to secure, clean, and curated data. To achieve this, they must liberate and migrate their data to the OSDU Data Platform. Our clients are dealing with large and highly complex data sets that have varying quality and formats. They also need to manage their ongoing business using the current and future capabilities of the OSDU Data Platform with its continual improvements of new data types and features. Accenture has planned a strategy that supports the transition from monolithic apps and data to the OSDU Data Platform at pace. Accenture and Microsoft are partners on this transformational journey as seen in Figure 1.
Our vision, your value
To be successful we believe there is a need to create and support a solution that provides an end-to-end business capability, focusing on business value and time-to-value acceleration.
Our approach will quickly prepare and present data to the user via the OSDU Data Platform irrespective of its current functionality and capability. By integrating and consolidating data in a standard format and enabling the interoperability of the platform across ISVs, operators can unlock the milestones to the right of the diagram and deliver the accelerated value they’ve been promised.
We think of it as supporting a data life cycle and journey to mitigate perceived risks due to the evolving nature of the OSDU Data Platform while continually improving your business workflows.
Why choose Microsoft Energy Data Services?
We recognize the complexity and risks involved in the transition and migration to the OSDU Data Platform. While energy companies have always managed E&P risk and uncertainty, there is generally a much lower appetite when it comes to IT and digital platforms. As a result, the industry is increasingly seeking packaged solutions or out-of-the-box delivery structures. This enables them to realize the visions promised by the OSDU Data Platform yet still focus on the “day job” and running their operations and business. These solutions and structures help de-risk the journey and minimize disruption to business continuity. Recognizing this, Microsoft developed an open-packaged solution to offer the OSDU Data Platform as a PaaS through Microsoft Energy Data Services.
Microsoft Energy Data Services was designed to support the energy industry’s ambition to accelerate innovation, develop enhanced insights to drive operational efficiency, and inform new ways of working and workflows. Microsoft Energy Data Services can accelerate the journey to a cloud-based OSDU Data Platform and thus, the path to value.
Accenture and Microsoft Energy Data Services collaboration
Accenture has helped deploy and test Microsoft Energy Data Services through the preview stages to provide feedback to Microsoft Engineering. Accenture is focused on connecting data to business value and working with Microsoft to deliver a fully integrated approach using the OSDU Data Platform to accelerate digital transformation. Accenture demonstrated this during the preview by deploying the Microsoft Energy Data Services solution, ingesting data with OSDU core service tools and Accenture proprietary tools, and stitching together a data workflow across multiple ISVs to validate the openness of the platform. During this process, Accenture has built a team that can help deploy and scale on Microsoft Energy Data Services.
Microsoft Energy Data Services differentiates itself as it will allow and enable:
- Integration with virtually any energy dataset, application, or cloud service with built-in tools.
- Management for compute-intensive workloads at a global scale.
- Compliance with the OSDU Technical Standard for open source innovation.
- Ease the deployment of the OSDU Data Platform while providing ongoing platform and management support to align to OSDU Data Platform deployments.
- Rapid data ingestion for analytics and decision-making.
- Increase operational efficiency and gain global scalability while reducing operational costs.
- Comprehensive security and compliance.
- Ability to easily leverage native Azure and Microsoft solutions.
Microsoft Energy Data Services further builds on and enables the OSDU Data Platform value drivers:
- The ability to access clean and curated historical data under a single data platform.
- Open access to innovation and a wider set of technology partners (ISVs).
- Removes siloes and barriers between disciplines and lays the foundation for digital transformation.
Accenture’s specific capabilities and toolkit
Data on its own is not the answer, and Accenture has been working hard to offer end-to-end services and tools which connect the full enterprise and business. The journey requires the need to deliver clean data to unlock value through data science, deploy, and roll out these solutions across global operations, and importantly, to instill trust from end users and the business to allow the value to be recognized.
Accenture is spearheading the industry adoption of the OSDU Data Platform to enable energy companies to accelerate their digital transformation. One such platform we are developing is the Accenture OnePlatform, as seen in Figures 3 and 4, which is a working solution to address the current issues and challenges and help execute the data to its maximum limit.
Figure 4: Accenture’s OnePlatform Data Workflow.
Accenture OnePlatform is a cloud-agnostic platform and one-stop solution for data extraction, schema mapping, metadata generation, and data ingestion that is operationally efficient. Accenture OnePlatform enables OSDU Data Platform services that are available with just one click without any need for extra plugins or any open source installations.
Some of the key highlights of Accenture OnePlatform are outlined below:
- Orchestration of the OSDU Data Platform: Provide end-to-end delivery of business workflows via a single interface.
- Data extraction: Extracting different data types by using a data type converter such as LAS, SegY, or ResQML.
- Schema Mapping: Mapping client data with Accenture OnePlatform–compliant data types by using AI/ML models.
- Metadata Generation: Generating metadata by using AI rule-based approach.
- Data Ingestion: Ingestion workflow. Running on click solution using python utilities.
- Data Validation: Validating records using python utilities by adding customized rules.
- Data Quality: Intelligent way to set up the rules and do the quality checks automatically.
- Knowledge Graph: Build Accenture OnePlatform-based ontology and give the semantic result to the customer.
In addition, the Accenture OnePlatform can serve as an orchestration tool across multiple SaaS ISV solutions. We know interoperability is a key value driver for choosing OSDU. Accenture has played a major role in ISV’s integration by collaborating with various ISVs and Microsoft for collective purpose of consuming the data available in single data platform. Accenture is working with several leading ISVs for development of their applications to fetch data according to the schemas from the OSDU Data Platform and Microsoft Energy Data Services, offering best-in-class interoperability and the ability to deliver end-to-end business workflows. Microsoft Energy Data Services with Accenture’s support has demonstrated the integration of DELFI with multiple ISV applications, such as Interica and Ikon Science, and we were pleased to demonstrate this at the Schlumberger Digital Forum 2022.
Conclusion
In closing, Accenture is committed to being a leading partner to help operators navigate the uncertainties around OSDU Data Platform implementation, manage the risks of deployment, and realize the full value of their data.
We believe Accenture is best placed to deliver on these commitments and enable your value based on our deep industry expertise, investments in accelerators like the Accenture OnePlatform, 14,000+ dedicated oil and gas skilled global practitioners with 250+ OSDU™-trained professionals, and our extensive ecosystem relationships. We are confident that our capabilities and our partnership with Microsoft are key to helping operators execute and scale their OSDU Data Platform transformation with Microsoft Energy Data Services and the interoperability of the platform.
How to work with Accenture on Microsoft Energy Data Services
Microsoft Energy Data Services is an enterprise-grade, fully managed, OSDU Data Platform for the energy industry that is efficient, standardized, easy to deploy, and scalable for data management—for ingesting, aggregating, storing, searching, and retrieving data. The platform will provide the scale, security, privacy, and compliance expected by our enterprise customers.
