Conceptual integration of value chain Value chain leads the way of oil and gas industry innovation.

The oil and gas industry (hereinafter referred to as oil and gas) is an industry with great periodic changes. As can be seen from the oil price: 1998 1 1 month, the crude oil price is 12 USD per barrel; In June 2008, it was 165438+ 10, and it became 60 dollars a barrel; In the next two months, it fell to $30 again. Oil and gas industry also has obvious industry characteristics, and the cycle time is relatively long. For example, to develop a new oil field, there must be at least a four-to five-year plan; The construction of a new oil refinery will not begin until five or seven years later.

In such an industry with long cycle and great changes, how to seek the road of innovation from the perspective of informationization? Dr Albrecht Ferling, managing director of Microsoft's global oil and gas industry department, believes that the development trend of oil and gas industry should be viewed from a long-term perspective. He believes that there are many new factors in the oil and gas industry at present: global financial and market restructuring, falling commodity prices lead to a decrease in cash flow, leading to a decrease in expenses and sluggish demand, leading to the emergence of temporarily idle production capacity.

Affected by the international financial crisis, the cost pressure is prominent, and many oil and gas companies are under pressure, so they first seek ways to reduce costs. Obviously, only reducing costs can't make oil and gas enterprises embark on the broad road. They need to use some new technologies to embark on the fast track of innovation and development, such as cloud computing, software plus services and other new technologies to help oil and gas enterprises realize the overall optimization of the entire value chain.

Start with reducing costs.

China Petroleum and Natural Gas Group Corporation (China Petroleum Group for short) is the largest producer and supplier of crude oil, natural gas, refining and chemical products in China. Headquartered in Beijing, it ranks seventh among the top 50 oil companies in the world and is the most profitable company in Asia in 2004. China Petroleum Group has oil and gas exploration, development and production projects all over the country, as well as in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, Russia and South America. Its business scope covers oil and gas business, engineering technical services, petroleum engineering construction and petroleum equipment manufacturing.

In order to provide information communication, cooperation and business process informationization throughout the enterprise, China Petroleum has established an internal office management system. Based on e-mail and enterprise information portal, we hope to strengthen the informatization of management, business and process of the two organs of the group company with enterprise knowledge management as the starting point, realize the collection and utilization of enterprise knowledge, provide complete knowledge management means and provide a platform for knowledge dissemination.

After full evaluation, China Petroleum chose Microsoft's server virtualization technology based on Hyper-V. Through flexible resource allocation, it effectively integrated server resources, supported SQL Server, Office and other applications, built a unified office management system for the enterprise, and formed an environment of vertical and horizontal communication, cooperation and collaborative work for the whole enterprise. In September 2008, China Petroleum successfully deployed the Microsoft server virtualization solution in the office management system, which effectively reduced the complexity and cost of IT environment management. Its benefits are obvious: the number of servers and power consumption are reduced by 45%, and the annual downtime is reduced to a few minutes, which greatly simplifies the IT environment.

"China Petroleum completely adopts Microsoft virtualization technology and products. We greatly reduce the number of physical servers, improve the efficiency and fun of servers, reduce the recovery time of the system and improve the availability of the system. At the same time, it is easy to manage and reduces the work intensity and workload of IT operation and maintenance personnel. " Dr. Ceng Ping of China Oil and Gas Group said.

Not only in China Petroleum, but also in a large Egyptian refinery, they also have more than 4,000 employees. Microsoft helped them successfully eliminate a mainframe system they used in the past, and turned to Microsoft virtualization technology based on Dell hardware, that is, deploying Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V on Dell PowerEdge 2900 server and using Microsoft virtual desktop infrastructure and Hyper-V to create virtual desktops for clients. After such deployment, their hardware cost, operation cost and energy consumption cost have all been reduced by more than 50%, server hardware and maintenance cost have been saved by 60%, efficiency and server utilization rate have been improved, management time has been reduced by 50%, and energy consumption has been reduced by 50%.

More innovation is needed to reduce expenses.

It is an obvious truth that only paying attention to reducing costs cannot make oil and gas enterprises embark on the road of innovation. While saving money, we should also invest in innovation, and BP has made great efforts in this regard. In 2008, BP adjusted its IT department by 20%, but they also knew that IT department played a very important role in supporting its business. Therefore, on the one hand, BP cut its IT staff by 20%, but on the other hand, it retrained all its staff. In addition to the six courses in the core field, there is also a special course to train IT departments on how to better cooperate with business departments and how to better support business departments.

From this point, we can get enlightenment: communication and cooperation are very important. A survey conducted jointly by Microsoft and Accenture shows that at least 40% engineers of oil and gas companies spend at least two hours searching for data every year; Another 30% people spend about 1 hour looking for data every day. Dr Albrecht believes that it is necessary for large oil and gas enterprises to build a platform for collaborative information management social network and enterprise performance. Such a platform can not only realize the connection between different departments and personnel within an oil and gas company, but also conveniently realize the connection between the personnel of this company and those of other companies, and also establish the necessary information base for oil and gas companies on this platform to realize real-time cross-border information sharing. So, how to achieve such a function? For example, Microsoft's product Sharepoint has been widely used by enterprises in the global oil and gas industry, and it is also the fastest-growing product in the Microsoft system. At present, the world's largest oil and gas company has deployed SharePoint in its global scope. Of course, not only SharePoint, but also other communication software, including Office Communicator and other products, are widely used.

Innovation needs a comprehensive perspective. In the oil and gas industry, the innovative application of information technology will run through the whole industrial chain from the well head to the pump mouth of gas station, so Microsoft put forward the concept of "integrated value chain". Dr Albrecht said: "The integration and optimization we see today are carried out in isolation at every link of the value chain. However, we believe that through close cooperation with many industry partners, Microsoft's innovative technology and deep understanding of the oil and gas industry will help global oil and gas enterprises realize the overall optimization of the entire value chain in the near future. "