International Business Machines (IBM) Corp and Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services said they would work together on a technology that will turn data largely from paper records, into a standardized format.

This will help especially multinational oil companies to improve efficiency across their operations.

In 2018, Amazon worked with Royal Dutch Shell to create this technology and now is being shared industry-wide on an open-source basis, and only works in cloud computing data centres.

Since countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Russia have no Amazon data centers therefore IBM and Amazon partnered to help them.

They will provide these oil producing countries with this new technology so that they can store their data within the country’s borders.

Using IBM technology called OpenShift, oil companies can use the oil-industry cloud data tools in their privately owned data centres within their countries.

"The data residency requirement is virtually 50% of the oil producing world today," said Manish Chawla, global managing director for energy, resources and manufacturing at IBM, in an interview. He added, "This is a pretty significant part of the market."

"As they transition to energy companies, it makes it easier for them, because they have all their wind data and their solar data, transmission line data, all this in there as well," said Bill Vass who is the vice president of engineering at AWS.

"You’d really don’t have a concept of how complicated the energy grid actually is until you start looking at all these different ways" of transmitting energy, he added further.

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