Digital Transformation is not a mere technology buzzword anymore. As the business landscape changes rapidly, especially in the new normal context, enterprises are striving to enhance digital technology resilience to adapt to such changes and transform how they meet their customers’ needs.

The advent of new technologies influences economic forces, degree of competition and government regulations to catalyse digitalization and fuel the organisational transformation in the oil and gas industry. Thus, to continuously improve the efficiency of downstream operations, many companies have focused on staying ahead of the digital curve. For continuous improvement in efficiency, productivity, and scalability, the Oil & Gas industry is combining the latest operational know-how with an enterprise-wide digital enablement approach. This digital leap is facilitated by new-age technologies, including advanced analytics, AI/ML, cloud computing, and IoT.

As a leader in the IT solutions & services segment, HPE is supporting energy corporations to adopt wide-scale process digitalization to usher in competitive advantage, drive innovation, and accelerate business growth. For instance, HPE helps India’s flagship national oil company, IndianOil, manage its complex processes, dynamic business demand patterns, and enormous volumes of data through one of the world’s largest SAP HANA implementations.

The Digitalization Effect

IndianOil is a leading player in India’s hydrocarbons value chain with a unique blend of upstream and downstream interests. The company’s activities span the entire value chain from refining and pipeline transportation to exploration, production, and marketing.

IndianOil’s portfolio includes various systems and processes that support its critical business functions. The functions include Sales and Distribution, Material Management, Quality Assurance, Finance and control, HR, payroll, and B2B engagements.

While implementing paperless operations, it is crucial to automate the numerous customer touchpoints that span industrial, institutional and retail consumers in domestic and international markets. To digitally cater to its vast distribution network (consisting of Fuel retailers, LPG distributors, Lube stockists and polymer dealers), IndianOil has been running a 16TB database to support its SAP ERP applications. The Corporation is also looking to reach up to 24TB of database size over five years. Hence, IndianOil was keen to adopt an ecosystem that not only supports today’s needs but will also handle tomorrow’s challenges.

To support its wide range of SAP Business Suite modules on HANA, IndianOil selected the HPE Superdome Flex. This revolutionary system features a unique modular building block architecture. With its memory-resiliency capabilities, this platform supports diverse and mission-critical applications across environments of all sizes while ensuring optimal performance, reliability, availability, and serviceability.

HPE enabled India’s largest SAP install base of mission-critical servers for the SAP HANA landscape for IndianOil, supporting the highest concurrent SAP users in the country. With HPE, IndianOil significantly increased its memory bandwidth across its server ecosystem. Consequently, the Corporation has remarkably improved system performance and faster data replication among the SAP HANA systems.

This has resulted in a more agile enterprise — the average response time for business transactions dropped by more than half. IndianOil can generate and process more invoices within the same time interval, thus resulting in amplified efficiencies in business and positively impacting its revenue. Quicker reports with data-driven insights enable IndianOil to make accurate real-time decisions.

“Our business transformation powered by end-to-end digital enablement has been relentlessly pursuing seamless automation, enhanced efficiencies, quicker response to market and increased customer delight. In this digital journey, we are well supported by our trusted technology partners, such as HPE. We are deeply engaged with HPE in the adoption of newer technologies which has helped us to gain key competitive advantage in terms of scalability and agility,” says Mr. Liton Nandy, Executive Director (Information Systems), IndianOil.

More in the Pipeline

HPE is continuously enabling enterprises such as IndianOil to drive unprecedented resilience, agility, and workload consolidation across its systems. IndianOil has implemented its first Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) with HPE DX (Nutanix) servers to streamline IT operations from core to edge across the distributed enterprise and run even the most demanding workloads with ease and efficiency.

HPE is helping oil and gas organisations build robust roadmaps to adopt the As-a-Service model and transition to the new normal. With the HPE GreenLake platform, enterprises can make significant strides towards digital transformation by rapidly adopting a hybrid cloud strategy with critical processes running on private and non-critical on the public cloud ecosystem and operating on an OPEX model of pay-per-use. HPE GreenLake empowers businesses to gain unprecedented agility and financial flexibility to move faster and deliver a seamless cloud experience from core to the edge.

As the business evolves, top energy players are rapidly undergoing the digital transformation to gain the economic advantage of self-service agility and seamless scalability. These organisations are adopting an edge-to-core hybrid computing environment to ultimately nurture future enterprises.